Statistical vs. Rule-Based Stemming for Monolingual French Retrieval

This paper describes our approach to the 2006 Adhoc Monolingual Information Retrieval run for French. The goal of our experiment was to compare the performance of a proposed statistical stemmer with that of a rule-based stemmer, specifically the French version of Porter's stemmer. The statistical stemming approach is based on lexicon clustering, using a novel string distance measure. We submitted three official runs, besides a baseline run that uses no stemming. The results show that stemming significantly improves retrieval performance (as expected) by about 9-10%, and the performance of the statistical stemmer is comparable with that of the rule-based stemmer. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; H.3.4 Systems and Software; H.3.7 Digital Libraries; H.2.3 [Database Managment]: Languages--Query Languages General Terms Performance, Experimentation Keywords statistica...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Prasenjit Majumder, Mandar Mitra, Kalyankumar Datta
• Keywords: CLEF 2006, Information Management, Monolingual Information Retrieval, Rule-based Stemmer, Statistical Stemmer