A Malay stemmer for Jawi characters

Abstract

The Malay language may be written using either Roman or Jawi characters. Most Malay stemmers cover only Roman (Rumi) affixes. This paper proposes a stemmer for Jawi characters using two sets of rules in Jawi: one set of rules is used to stem various forms of derived words, and another set is used to replace the use of a dictionary by producing the root word for each derivative. This stemmer has been tested using 1185 derived words consisting of prefix, circumfix, suffix, and infix. The results show that 84.89% of Jawi root words have been successfully stemmed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.