Abstract

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. 1 Introduction One of the techniques employed in Information Retrieval (IR) to improve performance is stemming of document and query terms. By reducing morphological variance of terms (e.g. mapping singular and plural forms of the same word on a single stem) researchers hope to improve the query-...

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