We investigate the effectiveness of language-dependent approaches to document retrieval, such as stemming and decompounding, and constrast them with language-independent approaches, such as character n-gramming. In order to reap the benefits of more than one type of approach, we also consider the effectiveness of the combination of both types of approaches. We focus on document retrieval in nine European languages: Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. We look at four different information retrieval tasks: monolingual, bilingual, multilingual, and domain-specific retrieval. The experimental evidence is obtained using the 2003 test suite of the cross-language evaluation forum (CLEF).
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