Exploiting Morphological Query Structure Using Genetic Optimisation

In this paper we deal with two issues. First, we discuss the negative effects of term correlation in query expansion algorithms, and we propose a novel and simple method (query clauses) to represent expanded queries which may alleviate some of these negative effects. Second, we discuss a method to optimise local query expansion methods using genetic algorithms, and we apply this method to improve stemming. We evaluate this method with the novel query representation method and show very significant improvements for the problem of optimising stemming.