Towards the automatic lemmatization of 16th century Mexican Spanish: A stemming scheme for the CHEM

Abstract

Two of the problems that should arise when developing a stemming scheme for diachronic corpora are: (1) morphological systems of natural languages may vary throughout time, and these changes are normally not documented sufficiently; and (2) they exhibit very diverse orthographic characteristics. In this short paper, a stemming strategy for a diachronic corpus of Mexican Spanish is briefly described, which partially faces up to these problems. Success rates of the method are contrasted to those of a Porter stemmer. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.