Using a WWW Search Engine to Evaluate Normalization Performance for a Highly Inflectional Language

Incorporation of language techniques in various web search engines has shown both positive and negative e ffects on retrieval performance. This paper describes an experiment conducted to determine the impact document and query normalization has on retrieval performance of a Greek web search engine. Experiments especially focus on the measurement of Recall and Precision of the obtained results and show whether information retrieval can benefit from normalization techniques. Results show that normalization yields s ignificant improvement concerning recall of the retrieved d ata, whereas precision strongly depends on the queries issued to the engine.