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Improving Arabic information retrieval using word embedding similarities

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Abstract

Term mismatch is a common limitation of traditional information retrieval (IR) models where relevance scores are estimated based on exact matching of documents and queries. Typically, good IR model should consider distinct but semantically similar words in the matching process. In this paper, we propose a method to incorporate word embedding (WE) semantic similarities into existing probabilistic IR models for Arabic in order to deal with term mismatch. Experiments are performed on the standard Arabic TREC collection using three neural word embedding models. The results show that extending the existing IR models improves significantly baseline bag-of-words models. Although the proposed extensions significantly outperform their baseline bag-of-words, the difference between the evaluated neural word embedding models is not statistically significant. Moreover, the overall comparison results show that our extensions significantly improve the Arabic WordNet based semantic indexing approach and three recent WE-based IR language models.

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Notes

  1. http://terrier.org/download/.

  2. https://sourceforge.net/projects/ar-text-mining/files/Arabic-Corpora/.

  3. LDC catalog number LDC2001T55.

  4. http://www.cls.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/langs/ara.

  5. https://code.google.com/archive/p/word2vec/.

  6. https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/.

  7. https://github.com/ielab/adcs2015-NTLM.

  8. https://github.com/gdebasis/wvlm/.

  9. http://arabic.emi.ac.ma/ibtikarat/?q=Resources.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Informatics and Modeling, Faculty of Sciences Dhar el Mahraz, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, Morocco

    Abdelkader El Mahdaouy & Saïd Ouatik El Alaoui

  2. Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG, 38000, Grenoble, France

    Abdelkader El Mahdaouy & Eric Gaussier

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  1. Abdelkader El Mahdaouy
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  2. Saïd Ouatik El Alaoui
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  3. Eric Gaussier
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Correspondence to Abdelkader El Mahdaouy.

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El Mahdaouy, A., El Alaoui, S.O. & Gaussier, E. Improving Arabic information retrieval using word embedding similarities. Int J Speech Technol 21, 121–136 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-018-9492-y

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