Analysis of Phonetic Matching Approaches for Indic Languages

Abstract: Phonetic matching plays an important role in multilingual information retrieval, where data is manipulated in multiple languages. User needs information in their local language which may be different from the language where data has been maintained. In such an environment, we need a system which matches the strings phonetically irrespective of errors either exactly or approximately. There are many errors or variations can be considered but here we had considered typographical errors, spelling errors as differ in vowel and matching of compound words. There are many approaches has been proposed like soundex, q-gram, phoenix etc., but they may produce an ambiguity in matching or may not be applicable to Indian languages. In this paper, we proposed approaches which match the strings either in Hindi or Marathi accurately. We evaluated the three approaches namely Soundex, Q-gram and Indic-Phonetic by generating cases like length-of-string (LOS), differ in vowel and compound words for Hindi and Marathi. We found that Indic-Phonetic approach is an efficient and accurate as compared to other two approaches.

Keywords: Soundex, Q-gram, Indic-phonetic, threshold, phonetic matching.