Report on CLEF-2003 monolingual tracks: Fusion of probabilistic models for effective monolingual retrieval

For our third participation in the CLEF evaluation campaign, our first objective was to propose more effective and general stop-word lists for the Swedish, Finnish and Russian languages, along with an improved, more efficient and simpler stemming procedure for these three languages. Our second goal was to suggest a combined search approach based on a data fusion strategy that would work with various European languages. Included in this combined approach is a decompounding strategy for the German, Dutch, Swedish and Finnish languages.