2 research outputs found
Keep It Simple Sheffield – a KISS approach to the Arabic track
Sheffield’s participation in the inaugural Arabic cross language track is described here. Our goal was to
examine how well one could achieve retrieval of Arabic text with the minimum of resources and adaptation
of existing retrieval systems. To this end the public translators used for query translation and the minimal
changes to our retrieval system are described. While the effectiveness of our resulting system is not as high
as one might desire, it nevertheless provides reasonable performance particularly in the monolingual track:
on average, just under four relevant documents were found in the 10 top ranked documents
Morphological variation of Arabic queries
Although it has been shown that in test collection based studies,
stemming improves retrieval effectiveness in an information retrieval system,
morphological variations of queries searching on the same topic are less well
understood. This work examines the broad morphological variation that
searchers of an Arabic retrieval system put into their queries. In this study, 15
native Arabic speakers were asked to generate queries, morphological variants
of query words were collated across users. Queries composed of either the
commonest or rarest variants of each word were submitted to a retrieval system
and the effectiveness of the searches was measured. It was found that queries
composed of the more popular morphological variants were more likely to
retrieve relevant documents that those composed of less popular