Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Xu, Jinxi
• Fraser, Alexander
• Weischedel, Ralph

Titel

Empirical studies in strategies for Arabic retrieval

Ist Teil von

• Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval: Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval; 11-15 Aug. 2002, 2002, p.269-274

Ort / Verlag

ACM

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

ACM Digital Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This work evaluates a few search strategies for Arabic monolingual and cross-lingual retrieval, using the TREC Arabic corpus as the test-bed. The release by NIST in 2001 of an Arabic corpus of nearly 400k documents with both monolingual and cross-lingual queries and relevance judgments has been a new enabler for empirical studies. Experimental results show that spelling normalization and stemming can significantly improve Arabic monolingual retrieval. Character tri-grams from stems improved retrieval modestly on the test corpus, but the improvement is not statistically significant. To further improve retrieval, we propose a novel thesaurus-based technique. Different from existing approaches to thesaurus-based retrieval, ours formulates word synonyms as probabilistic term translations that can be automatically derived from a parallel corpus. Retrieval results show that the thesaurus can significantly improve Arabic monolingual retrieval. For cross-lingual retrieval (CLIR), we found that spelling normalization and stemming have little impact.