To stop or not to stop - Experiments on stopword elimination for information retrieval of Gujarati text documents

Words that frequently occur in a document but carry less significant meaning are called stopwords. Identification and removal of stopwords can result in effective indexing of documents. Mean average precision (MAP) is the metric used to measure the efficiency of information retrieval (IR) tasks. In this paper, we have experimented with elimination of Gujarati stopwords to measure the improvements in Adhoc monolingual information retrieval of Gujarati text documents. Results show that elimination of stopwords improve the MAP values of Gujarati IR.