n-Gram-based indexing for Korean text retrieval

Two groups of indexing methods and morpheme-based indexing have been invest igated in the literature of Korean text retrieval. The word-based indexing eliminates the suffix of a word, and generates its remaining stem as an ind ex term. The index term is often a compound noun, which results in the seri ous decrease of retrieval effectiveness. The morpheme-based indexing overco mes the problem of compound nouns by decomposing a compound noun into simpl e nouns. It, however, requires a large dictionary and complex linguistic kn owledge. In this paper we propose a new indexing method based on n-gram-bas ed indexing is considerably faster than the morpheme-based indexing, and al so provides better retrieval effectiveness. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.