West Group participated in the non-English monolingual retrieval task for French and German. Our primary interest was to investigate whether retrieval of German or French documents was any different from the retrieval of English documents. We focused on two aspects: stemming for both languages and compound breaking for German. In particular, we studied several query formulations to take advantage of German compounds. Our results suggest that German retrieval is indeed different from English or French retrieval, inasmuch as accounting for compounds can significantly improve performance.