Information Retrieval in African Languages

Developing Information Retrieval (IR) tools and techniques in African languages suffers from the dual problems of a lack of algorithms and very small test data collections. This affects the creation of practical IR systems and limits the ability to apply IR to address human and socio-economic problems, which is an urgent need in poor countries. This position paper presents an overview of recent and current work conducted at the University of Cape Town in this area. While many problems have been investigated at an early stage, limited dataset sizes for local African languages still persists as a significant limitation and stumbling block.