A Comprehensive Analysis of Stemmers Available for Indic Languages

Abstract

Stemming is the process of term conflation. It conflates all the word variants to a common form called as stem. It plays significant role in numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications like morphological analysis, parsing, document summarization, text classification, part-of-speech tagging, question-answering system, machine translation, word sense disambiguation, information retrieval (IR), etc. Each of these tasks requires some pre-processing to be done. Stemming is one of the important building blocks for all these applications. This paper, presents an overview of various stemming techniques, evaluation criteria for stemmers and various existing stemmers for Indic languages.