Viewing Stemming as Recall Enhancement

Previous research on stemming has shown both positive and negative effects on retrieval performance. This paper describes an experiment in which several linguistic and non-linguistic stemmers are evaluated on a Dutch test collection. Experiments especially focus on the measurement of Recall. Results show that linguistic stemming restricted to inflection yields a significant improvement over full linguistic and non-linguistic stemming, both in average Precision and R-Recall. Best results are obtained with a linguistic stemmer which is enhanced with compound analysis. This version has a significantly better Recall than a system without stemming, without a significant deterioration of Precision.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Wessel Kraaij, Renée Pohlmann
• Keywords: Dutch Test Collection, Information Management, Linguistic Stemmer, Negative Effects, SIGIR 1996