SEFRA - Web-based framework customizable for Serbian language search applications

Abstract

This paper presents SEFRA - a web-based framework for searching Web content written in Serbian. SEFRA is an easily customizable hybrid solution that can be a platform for new search applications and/or a service for already existing ones. The proposed architecture solves the problems of indexing, searching and displaying search results adjusted for Serbian. It unifies several web technologies and services into one product suitable for use in the Western Balkan’s countries for helping e-Government citizens’ services and other public-sector services, private company administration, solving specific search problems for academic institutions and scientific literature publishers, etc. The proposed solution uses advanced Serbian language services accessible over the Web. It is also implementable for any other language where the target language morphology service exists. In other words, architecture is also customizable in this direction. It should be noted that the proposed architecture is optimized from both backend and web front-end perspective. The source code can be pulled from https://bitbucket.org/mjovanov/pretraga/. The one application of the proposed architecture is experimentally demonstrated through the search of crime law documents of Serbia. The experimental usage of this implementation shows that the problem of search relevance, is well-solved and easily customizable.