Suffix Tree Based Approach for Chinese Information Retrieval

With the widespread of the Internet, great research in-terests are being shown in Chinese language information retrieval in recent years. The absence of word bound-aries in Chinese language makes Chinese information re-trieval(IR) different to European IR. In order to apply tradi-tional IR approaches to Chinese language, sentences have to be segmented into words first. Word segmentation is playing a key role in Chinese IR. As word segmentation is not straightforward and the results are sometime am-biguous, n-grams are used as an alternative. Several ex-perimental studies have been conducted to compare words and n-grams[5, 6], word segmentation and its effect on in-formation retrieval[3]. These studies show that using ei-ther words or n-grams leads to comparable performances. Higher word segmentation accuracy does not necessarily result in better retrieval performance. In this paper we pro-pose a suffix tree based approach for Chinese information retrieval without word segementation. 1