Stemming and root-based approaches to the retrieval of Arabic documents on the Web

Using information retrieval systems to gain access to documents in languages other than English is becoming an increasingly significant problem. Rules, theories, algorithms, and retrieval methods designed and developed for English and other morphologically similar languages may or may not apply in the linguistic environments of other languages. The problem is particularly acute in languages that differ radically from English on account of morphological rules. This paper compares the effects stemming and root retrieval on information retrieval in Arabic through an exploratory study of the handling of Arabic words by an English-language search engine (ELSE). Search experiments, using 2000 Arabic documents and 40 Arabic search terms (nouns), were conducted in a Web search engine developed for English (AltaVista) and in an Arabic search engine (al-Idrisi) to compare the performances of stemming and root retrieval and to investigate the possibility of adapting AltaVista for use with Arabic text. The results of the experiments show that more effective retrieval can be accomplished through stemming, and that it is possible to adapt an ELSE for use with Arabic without the need to develop root-retrieval features.