An iterative suffix stripping Tamil Stemmer

Abstract

Stemming algorithm is a procedure that attempts to map all the derived forms of a word to a single root, the stem. It is widely used in Information Retrieval applications with the main objective of enhancing the recall factor. Stemmer is also used in various other applications such as summarization, classification and text mining etc. Apart from English, exploration on developing stemmers for both the native and the regional languages are also being carried out. In this paper, we present a stemmer for Tamil, a Dravidian language. Our stemmer effectiveness is 84.79%. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg.