Information retrieval on Turkish texts

In this study, we investigate information retrieval (IR) on Turkish texts using a large-scale test collection that contains 408,305 documents and 72 ad hoc queries. We examine the effects of several stemming options and query-document matching functions on retrieval performance. We show that a simple word truncation approach, a word truncation approach that uses language-dependent corpus statistics, and an elaborate lemmatizer-based stemmer provide similar retrieval effectiveness in Turkish IR. We investigate the effects of a range of search conditions on the retrieval performance; these include scalability issues, query and document length effects, and the use of stopword list in indexing.