Arabic Book Retrieval using Class and Book Index Based Term Weighting

Abstract

One of the most common issue in information retrieval is documents ranking. Documents ranking system collects search terms from the user and orderly retrieves documents based on the relevance. Vector space models based on TF.IDF term weighting is the most common method for this topic. In this study, we are concerned with the study of automatic retrieval of Islamic <em>Fiqh</em> (Law) book collection. This collection contains many books, each of which has tens to hundreds of pages. Each page of the book is treated as a document that will be ranked based on the user query. We developed class-based indexing method called inverse class frequency (ICF) and book-based indexing method inverse book frequency (IBF) for this Arabic information retrieval. Those method then been incorporated with the previous method so that it becomes TF.IDF.ICF.IBF. The term weighting method also used for feature selection due to high dimensionality of the feature space. This novel method was tested using a dataset from 13 Arabic Fiqh e-books. The experimental results showed that the proposed method have the highest precision, recall, and F-Measure than the other three methods at variations of feature selection. The best performance of this method was obtained when using best 1000 features by precision value of 76%, recall value of 74%, and F-Measure value of 75%.