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Evaluation of Corpora, Resources and Tools for Amharic Information Retrieval

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• First Online: 15 July 2021
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• Tilahun Yeshambel 20 ,
• Josiane Mothe 21 &
• Yaregal Assabie 22  

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering ((LNICST,volume 384))

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Amharic is the working language of Ethiopia. It is the second-most commonly spoken Semitic language in the world next to Arabic. Amharic is morphologically complex and under-resourced, which poses tremendous challenges for natural language processing. The development of fully functional Amharic text processing applications is a non-trivial task for researchers and developers. Despite attempts to develop some applications, lack of standards in corpus collection and resource development resulted in the problem of interoperability. The aim of this paper is to present and evaluate the accessibility of Amharic corpora, resources and tools with the purpose of highlighting the status of Amharic language processing applications. We present available resources and linguistic tools, assess their usability and effectiveness, investigate the implications of the morphological complexity and put the way forward in the development of Amharic text processing applications.

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Other Semitic languages are for example: Arabic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Geez, etc.

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IT PhD Program, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Tilahun Yeshambel

INSPE, Univ. de Toulouse, IRIT, UMR5505 CNRS, Toulouse, France

Josiane Mothe

Department of Computer Science, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Yaregal Assabie

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Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

Mulugeta Admasu Delele

Mekuanint Agegnehu Bitew

Abebech Abera Beyene

Solomon Workneh Fanta

Addisu Negash Ali

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Yeshambel, T., Mothe, J., Assabie, Y. (2021). Evaluation of Corpora, Resources and Tools for Amharic Information Retrieval. In: Delele, M.A., Bitew, M.A., Beyene, A.A., Fanta, S.W., Ali, A.N. (eds) Advances of Science and Technology. ICAST 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 384. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80621-7_34

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Geez To Amharic Automatic Machine Translation: A Statistical Approach

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The Nexus Between Higher Education Expansion and Economic Growth in Ethiopia: An Empirical Examination

• Paulos C. Tsegaw Virginia State University

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