Noun Identification for Tamil Language using Morphophonemic Rules

Abstract

In any language, words are considered as the basic or the smallest element with a distinctive meaning. Words can be categorized into several types, depending upon their use and functions. Basically how a word changes its form to express itself in grammatical notation defines its type. The process of categorizing a word to a particular type depending upon its grammatical notation is termed as Part of Speech tagging. In this paper, an attempt has been made to identify part of speech tagging for words in Tamil language, particular to noun inflections. An algorithm has been proposed for Noun Identification for Tamil Language using Morphophonemic Rules (NIMR). A Rule based suffix stripping approach has been adopted for this implementation. The approach proposed here identifies the root word by applying various morphophonemic rules particular to suffixes. It removes the various inflections based on the set of grammatical rules available for Tamil Language and tags the word identified as a Noun. It is proposed to explore the traditional way of categorizing words in Tamil language, avoiding the influence of English grammars.