An adaptive information retrieval system for efficient web searching

Abstract

Stemming algorithms (stemmers) are used to convert the words to their root form (stem), this process is used in the pre-processing stage of the Information Retrieval Systems. The Stemmers affect the indexing time by reducing the size of index file and improving the performance of the retrieval process. There are several stemming algorithms, the most widely used is porter stemming algorithm because of its efficiency, simplicity, speed, and also it easily handles exceptions. However there are some drawbacks, although many attempts were made to improve its structure but it was incomplete. This paper provides an efficient information retrieval technique as well as proposes a new stemming algorithm called Enhanced Porter’s Stemming Algorithm (EPSA). The objective of this technique is to overcome the drawbacks of the porter algorithm and improve the web searching. The EPSA was applied to two datasets to measure its performance. The result shows improvement of the precision over the original porter algorithm while realizing approximately the same recall percentage.