Developing a stemmer for German based on a comparative analysis of publicly available stemmers

Abstract

Stemmers, which reduce words to their stems, are important components of many natural language processing systems. In this paper, we conduct a systematic evaluation of several stemmers for German using two gold standards we have created and will release to the community. We then present our own stemmer, which achieves state-of-the-art results, is easy to understand and extend, and will be made publicly available both for use by programmers and as a benchmark for further stemmer development.