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European Conference on Information Retrieval

ECIR 2006: Advances in Information Retrieval pp 49–60Cite as

Generating Search Term Variants for Text Collections with Historic Spellings

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3936))

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a new approach for retrieval in texts with non-standard spelling, which is important for historic texts in English or German. For this purpose, we present a new algorithm for generating search term variants in ancient orthography. By applying a spell checker on a corpus of historic texts, we generate a list of candidate terms for which the contemporary spellings have to be assigned manually. Then our algorithm produces a set of probabilistic rules. These probabilities can be considered for ranking in the retrieval stage. An experimental comparison shows that our approach outperforms competing methods.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

    Andrea Ernst-Gerlach & Norbert Fuhr

Authors
  1. Andrea Ernst-Gerlach
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  2. Norbert Fuhr
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK

    Mounia Lalmas

  2. Department of Information Science, City University, Northampton Square, EC1V OHB, London, UK

    Andy MacFarlane

  3. Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, MK7 6AA, Milton Keynes, UK

    Stefan Rüger

  4. Queen Mary University of London, UK

    Anastasios Tombros

  5. CWI, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Theodora Tsikrika

  6. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, SW7 2AZ, London, UK

    Alexei Yavlinsky

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ernst-Gerlach, A., Fuhr, N. (2006). Generating Search Term Variants for Text Collections with Historic Spellings. In: Lalmas, M., MacFarlane, A., Rüger, S., Tombros, A., Tsikrika, T., Yavlinsky, A. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3936. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11735106_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11735106_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-33347-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-33348-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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