There have been multiple attempts to resolve the various formation matching problem in information retrieval. Stemming is a common strategy to this end. Among many approaches for stemming, statistical stemming has shown to be effective in a few number of languages, particularly those highly inflected ones. Common statistical approaches heavily relies on string similarity in terms of prefix and suffix matching. In this paper we propose a method that is able to find any popular affix in any position of a word; specifically finding infixes is a required task in Persian, Arabic, and Malay particularly in irregular formations and is a future challenge in informal texts. The proposed method aims at finding a number of transformation rules for expanding a word with its inflectional/derivation formations. Our experimental results on CLEF 2008 and CLEF 2009 English-Persian CLIR tasks indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms all the baselines in terms of MAP.
['Javid Dadashkarimi', 'Hossein Nasr Esfahani', 'Heshaam Faili', 'Azadeh Shakery']
Unsupervised Formation Matching in Highly Inflected Languages