Answered by Shaimaa E Saleh

Introduction to information retrieval

Chapter 2: The term vocabulary and postings lists – Exercise solutions

a. False: stemming can harm precision. For example when searching for “Marketing”
document contain “Market” is less relevant to the search query.
b. True
c. False stemming reduces the size of vocabulary by merging variant forms of the stemmed
word.
d. False stemming should be invoked at both indexing and query processing steps.

a. cos
b. shiite
c. contd
d. hawaii
e. orourke

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 Answered by Shaimaa E Saleh

c. marketing/market should not be conflated as both words has different meanings and used
within different context, using the stemmed term will harm precision.

d. university/universe should not be conflated as both words has different meanings and
used within different context, using the stemmed term will harm precision.

a. Words ending in “SS” should end with “SS” in the stemmed term as the “SS” is part of
the word and not a suffix. For example stress -> stress K caress-> caress
b. circus canari boss
c. (*v*) Y-> I so pony -> poni
d. No. it will not have any deleterious effect on retrieval. Because stemming of both the
words result in the same word.

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