Ibrahim Abu El-khair

Ibrahim Abu El-Khair

The effectiveness of three stop words lists for Arabic Information Retrieval---General Stoplist, Corpus-Based Stoplist, Combined Stoplist ---were investigated in this study. Three popular weighting schemes were examined: the inverse document frequency weight, probabilistic weighting, and statistical language modelling. The Idea is to combine the statistical approaches with linguistic approaches to reach an optimal performance, and compare their effect on retrieval. The LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) Arabic Newswire data set was used with the Lemur Toolkit. The Best Match weighting scheme used in the Okapi retrieval system had the best overall performance of the three weighting algorithms used in the study, stoplists improved retrieval effectiveness especially when used with the BM25 weight. The overall performance of a general stoplist was better than the other two lists.

Ibrahim Abu El-khair

This study is an attempt to build a contemporary linguistic corpus for Arabic language. The corpus produced, is a text corpus includes more than five million newspaper articles. It contains over a billion and a half words in total, out of which, there is about three million unique words. The data were collected from newspaper articles in ten major news sources from eight Arabic countries, over a period of fourteen years. The corpus was encoded with two types of encoding, namely: UTF-8, and Windows CP-1256. Also it was marked with two mark-up languages, namely: SGML, and XML.