Abductive reasoning through filtering

Morphology is the area of linguistics concerned with the internal structure of words. Information retrieval has generally not paid much attention to word structure, other than to account for some of the variability in word forms via the use of stemmers. We report on our experiments to determine the importance of morphology, and the effect that it has on performance. We found that grouping morphological variants makes a significant improvement in retrieval performance. Improvements are seen by grouping inflectional as well as derivational variants. We also found that performance was enhanced by recognizing lexical phrases. We describe the interaction between morphology and lexical ambiguity, and how resolving that ambiguity will lead to further improvements in performance.