Character-Based N-gram Model for Uyghur Text Retrieval

Uyghur is a low resourced language, but Uyghur Information Retrieval (IR) is getting more and more important recently. Although there are related research results and stem-based Uyghur IR systems, it is always difficult to obtain high-performance retrieval results due to the limitations of the existing stemming method. In this paper, we propose a character-based N-gram model and the corresponding smoothing algorithm for Uyghur IR. A full-text IR system based on character N-gram model is developed using the open-source tool Lucene. A series of experiments and comparative analysis are conducted. Experimental results show that our proposed method has the better performance compared with conventional Uyghur IR systems.