Shallow Morphological Analysis in Monolingual Information Retrieval for Dutch, German, and Italian

Abstract

This paper describes the experiments of our team for CLEF 2001, which include both official and post-submission runs. We took part in the monolingual task for Dutch, German, and Italian. The focus of our experiments was on the effects of morphological analyses, such as stemming and compound splitting, on retrieval effectiveness. Confirming earlier reports on retrieval in compound splitting languages such as Dutch and German, we found improvements to be around 25% for German and as much as 69% for Dutch. For Italian, lexicon-based stemming resulted in gains of up to 25%.