UzbekStemmer: Development of a Rule-Based Stemming Algorithm for Uzbek Language
This work addresses the challenge of text processing for Uzbek language users, but it is incremental as it applies existing rule-based methods to a new language.
The paper tackles the problem of stemming for the agglutinative Uzbek language by developing a rule-based algorithm using finite state machines and an affix stripping approach, resulting in a functional stemming application without relying on a database of normal word forms.
In this paper we present a rule-based stemming algorithm for the Uzbek language. Uzbek is an agglutinative language, so many words are formed by adding suffixes, and the number of suffixes is also large. For this reason, it is difficult to find a stem of words. The methodology is proposed for doing the stemming of the Uzbek words with an affix stripping approach whereas not including any database of the normal word forms of the Uzbek language. Word affixes are classified into fifteen classes and designed as finite state machines (FSMs) for each class according to morphological rules. We created fifteen FSMs and linked them together to create the Basic FSM. A lexicon of affixes in XML format was created and a stemming application for Uzbek words has been developed based on the FSMs.