Haile ) and ( ? ? ? ? ? , Selassie ) . TM has been shown to be effective in several Information Retrieval ( IR ) and Natural Language Processing ( NLP ) applications . For example , in cross language IR , TM was used to handle out-of-vocabulary query words by mining transliterations between words in queries and top n retrieved documents and then using transliterations to expand queries ( Udupa et al , 2009a ) .