1 Summary Building an Arabic Stemmer for Information Retrieval

In TREC 2002 the Berkeley group participated only in the English-Arabic cross-language retrieval (CLIR) track. One Arabic monolingual run and three English-Arabic cross-language runs were submitted. Our approach to the crosslanguage retrieval was to translate the English topics into Arabic using online English-Arabic machine translation systems. The four official runs are named as BKYMON, BKYCL1, BKYCL2, and BKYCL3. The BKYMON is the Arabic monolingual run, and the other three runs are English-to-Arabic cross-language runs. This paper reports on the construction of an Arabic stoplist and two Arabic stemmers, and the experiments on Arabic monolingual retrieval, English-to-Arabic cross-language retrieval.