Abstract
African historical data presents unique challenges to search algorithms because much of the data was produced by colonial authorities or archivists far from the source of the data. Contemporary datasets include descriptions of museum artefacts in European museums and books written by colonial administrators, both of which encode African history. These are both arguably biased collections and the information retrieval algorithms used to search through such data collections may not provide modern researchers with relevant results. The goal of this study was therefore to investigate the degree to which common text and image pre-processing algorithms affect the quality of search results when users search through a current African historical data collection. Nine common algorithms were compared in terms of recall, precision and NDCG. The results indicate that text pre-processing performs better when stemming and stopping are used but thesaurus use may depend on the thesaurus chosen. Results from the image pre-processing experiment indicate that shape detectors generally work better than colour detectors.
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Acknowledgements
This research was partially funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant numbers: 105862, 119121 and 129253) and University of Cape Town. The authors acknowledge that opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are that of the authors, and that the NRF accepts no liability whatsoever in this regard.
We would like to acknowledge the Archive & Public Culture research initiative at the University of Cape Town for allowing this research to use the Five Hundred Year Archive data collection for the purposes of this study.
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Singh, S., Suleman, H. (2022). A Comparison of Information Retrieval Pre-processing Algorithms Applied to African Historical Data. In: Tseng, YH., Katsurai, M., Nguyen, H.N. (eds) From Born-Physical to Born-Virtual: Augmenting Intelligence in Digital Libraries. ICADL 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13636. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21756-2_18
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