Abstract
We participated in the WebCLEF 2005 monolingual task. In this task, a search system aims to retrieve relevant documents from a multilingual corpus of Web documents from Web sites of European governments. Both the documents and the queries are written in a wide range of European languages. A challenge in this setting is to detect the language of documents and topics, and to process them appropriately. We develop a language specific technique for applying the correct stemming approach, as well as for removing the correct stopwords from the queries. We represent documents using three fields, namely content, title, and anchor text of incoming hyperlinks. We use a technique called per-field normalisation, which extends the Divergence From Randomness (DFR) framework, to normalise the term frequencies, and to combine them across the three fields. We also employ the length of the URL path of Web documents. The ranking is based on combinations of both the language specific stemming, if applied, and the per-field normalisation. We use our Terrier platform for all our experiments. The overall performance of our techniques is outstanding, achieving the overall top four performing runs, as well as the top performing run without metadata in the monolingual task. The best run only uses per-field normalisation, without applying stemming.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Amati, G.: Probabilistic Models for Information Retrieval based on Divergence from Randomness. PhD thesis, Dept of Computing Science, University of Glasgow (2003)
Cavnar, W.B., Trenkle, J.M.: N-gram-based text categorization. In: Proceedings of SDAIR 1994, pp. 161–175 (1994)
Craswell, N., Hawking, D., Wilkinson, R., Wu, M.: Overview of the TREC-2003 Web Track. In: Proceedings of TREC 2003 (2003)
Craswell, N., Hawking, D.: Overview of the TREC-2004 Web Track. In: Proceedings of TREC 2004 (2004)
Hawking, D., Upstill, T., Craswell, N.: Towards better weighting of anchors. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2004, pp. 512–513 (2004)
He, B., Ounis, I.: A study of the Dirichlet Priors for term frequency normalisation. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2005, pp. 465–471 (2005)
Hollink, V., Kamps, J., Monz, C., de Rijke, M.: Monolingual Document Retrieval for European Languages. Information Retrieval 7(1-2), 33–52 (2004)
Hunspell & Hunstem: Hungarian version of Ispell & Hungarian stemmer, http://magyarispell.sourceforge.net/
Jansen, B.J., Spink, A.: An analysis of Web searching by European AlltheWeb.com users. Inf. Process. Manage 41(2), 361–381 (2005)
Ounis, I., Amati, G., Plachouras, V., He, B., Macdonald, C., Johnson, D.: Terrier Information Retrieval Platform. In: Losada, D.E., Fernández-Luna, J.M. (eds.) ECIR 2005. LNCS, vol. 3408, pp. 517–519. Springer, Heidelberg (2005), http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/terrier/
Plachouras, V., He, B., Ounis, I.: University of Glasgow at TREC2004: Experiments in Web, Robust and Terabyte tracks with Terrier. In: Proceedings of TREC (2004)
Rose, D.E., Levinson, D.: Understanding user goals in web search. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 13–19 (2004)
Sigurbjonsson, B., Kamps, J., de Rijke, M.: EuroGOV: Engineering a Multilingual Web Corpus. In: Peters, C., Gey, F.C., Gonzalo, J., Müller, H., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B., de Rijke, M., Giampiccolo, D. (eds.) CLEF 2005. LNCS, vol. 4022, pp. 825–836. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Snowball stemmers, http://snowball.tartarus.org/
van Noord, G.: TextCat language guesser, http://odur.let.rug.nl/~1vannoord/TextCat/
Zaragoza, H., Craswell, N., Taylor, M., Saria, S., Robertson, S.: Microsoft Cambridge at TREC-13: Web and HARD tracks. In: Proceedings of TREC (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Macdonald, C., Plachouras, V., He, B., Lioma, C., Ounis, I. (2006). University of Glasgow at WebCLEF 2005: Experiments in Per-Field Normalisation and Language Specific Stemming. In: Peters, C., et al. Accessing Multilingual Information Repositories. CLEF 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4022. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11878773_100
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11878773_100
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-45697-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45700-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)