Information Retrieval from Full-Text Arabic Databases: Can Search Engines Designed for English Do the Job?

Abstract

The amount of electronic information in Arabic and other non-English languages available, especially on the World Wide Web, is increasing. Searches for such information can be undertaken on engines developed with the English language in mind, but will these engines work as effectively in other languages? This article investigates the impact on retrieval of prefixes in Arabic, which are far more common than in English. Typically search engines such as AltaVista designed implicitly for English include right hand (suffix) but not left hand (prefix) truncation. A test collection of 271Arabic HTML records was created and indexed using the personal version of AltaVista. A series of searches was conducted on this collection, again using AltaVista. The results showed that searches on nouns stripped of prefixes reduced recall, in some cases dramatically, and that total recall of nouns can only be guaranteed by repeating searches that include the various prefixed versions of the nouns. The research questions the assumption that search engines designed with English in mind will work as well with different language structures.

Clustering Web Search Results for Effective Arabic Language Browsing

“…It belongs to the Semitic family of languages. It is significantly different from English and other European languages in a number of important respects [13]:…”

Search engine for Amharic Web content

“…In line with this, the performances of general and Arabic search engines were compared in [10] based on their ability to retrieve morphologically related Arabic terms. A paper by Moukdad and Large [7] also evaluated the capabilities of AltaVista for retrieving documents from full-text Arabic database. The fmdings highlight the importance of making users aware of what they miss by using the general search engines, underscoring the need to modify these engines to better handle Arabic queries.…”

Arabic information retrieval

“…They are spelled out fully only in the Qur'an (to ensure a correct reading), in some school textbooks, and in many theological books. In almost all other Arabic texts, these diacritics are omitted—a practice that can lead to homonymy (Moukdad & Large, 2001).…”