Statistical vs. rule-based stemming for monolingual French retrieval

Abstract

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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.