Broken plural detection for arabic information retrieval

Abstract

Due to the high number of inflectional variations of Arabic words, empirical results suggest that stemming is essential for Arabic information retrieval. However, current light stemming algorithms do not extract the correct stem of irregular (so-called broken) plurals, which constitute ~10% of Arabic texts and ~41% of plurals. Although light stemming in particular has led to improvements in information retrieval [5, 6], the effects of broken plurals on the performance of information retrieval systems has not been examined.We propose a light stemmer that incorporates a broken plural recognition component, and evaluate it within the context of information retrieval. Our results show that identifying broken plurals and reducing them to their correct stems does result in a significant improvement in the performance of information retrieval systems.