COMPARING WORDS, STEMS, AND ROOTS AS INDEX TERMS IN AN ARABIC INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

The Micro-AIRS System, a microcomputer system for Arabic Information Retrieval, was designed as an experimental system to investigate indexing and retrieval processes for Arabic bibliographic data. A series of experiments were performed using 29 queries against a base of 355 Arabic bibliographic records, covering computer and information science from the bibliographic databank at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. These experiments revealed that using roots and using stems as index terms gives better retrieval results than using words. The root performs as well as or better than the stem at low recall levels and definitely better at high recall levels. Several different binary similarity coefficients were tried: the cosine, Dice, and Jaccard coefficients. All three led to exactly the same document rankings for every query. The experiments were run on an IBM/AT-compatible microcomputer. Micro-AIRS is written in Turbo C, Version 2.0.