Experiments to Investigate the Connection between Case Distribution and Topical Relevance of Search Terms in an Information Retrieval Setting

Jussi Karlgren, Hercules Dalianis, Bart Jongejan


Abstract
We have performed a set of experiments made to investigate the utility of morphological analysis to improve retrieval of documents written in languages with relatively large morphological variation in a practical commercial setting, using the SiteSeeker search system developed and marketed by Euroling Ab. The objective of the experiments was to evaluate different lemmatisers and stemmers to determine which would be the most practical for the task at hand: highly interactive, relatively high precision web searches in commercial customer-oriented document collections. This paper gives an overview of some of the results for Finnish and German, and describes specifically one experiment designed to investigate the case distribution of nouns in a highly inflectional language (Finnish) and the topicality of the nouns in target texts. We find that topical nouns taken from queries are distributed differently over relevant and non-relevant documents depending on their grammatical case.
Anthology ID:
L08-1297
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/383_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jussi Karlgren, Hercules Dalianis, and Bart Jongejan. 2008. Experiments to Investigate the Connection between Case Distribution and Topical Relevance of Search Terms in an Information Retrieval Setting. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Experiments to Investigate the Connection between Case Distribution and Topical Relevance of Search Terms in an Information Retrieval Setting (Karlgren et al., LREC 2008)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/383_paper.pdf