Effects of diacritics in Turkish information retrieval

In this study, we investigated the loss of retrieval performance by writing Turkish text with English Alphabet. As a starting point of this study, we first calculated the loss rate when either documents or queries do not include any Turkish diacritics. After this point we apply document and query expansion techniques to reach the initial performance. Additional to document indexing and query processing techniques, we also investigated the effects of stemming, weighting methods and query lengths on Turkish information retrieval. Our test results show that document expansion technique and equivalence classes produced good results to gain the initial performance.