The effect of syntactic phrase indexing on retrieval performance for Dutch texts
Renée Pohlmann, Wessel Kraaij · 1997
In this paper we describe an experiment with syntactic phrase indexing for Dutch texts. We compare different choices for combining terms to form head-modifier pairs and we also investigate the effect of adding none, one, or all constituent parts of the pair as a separate index term. The results of our experiments show that using head-modifier pairs as index terms can improve both recall and precision significantly but only if all constituent parts are also added separately. We found that using both Noun-Adjective and Noun-Noun head-modifier pairs produced the best results. Keywords Natural language processing; syntactic phrase indexing; head-modifier pairs; Dutch. 1 Introduction The work described in this paper is part of the UPLIFT project 1 . UPLIFT investigates whether linguistic tools can improve and extend the functionality of vector space text retrieval systems. This paper describes an experiment with syntactic phrase indexing for Dutch texts. The basic idea behind phrase i...