JAIT 2023 Vol.14(4): 863-875
doi: 10.12720/jait.14.4.863-875

PWMStem: A Corpus-Based Suffix Identification and Stripping Algorithm for Multi-lingual Stemming

Abdul Jabbar1 , Manzoor Illahi1 , Sajid Iqbal2 , Amjad Rehman Khan3,* , Narmine ElHakim3 , Tanzila Saba3

  • 1Department of Computer Science, Comsats University Islamabad (CUI), Main Campus, Park Road, Tarlai Kalan, Islamabad 45550, Pakistan
  • 2Department of Information Systems, College of Computer Science and Information Technology, King Faisal University, Saudi Arabia
  • 3Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics Lab CCIS Prince Sultan University Riyadh 11586, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding author

  • Manuscript receivedApril 24, 2023
  • revisedJune 14, 2023
  • acceptedJuly 3, 2023
  • publishedAugust 28, 2023

Abstract

Stemming is a common preprocessing method aggregating all word variants to a standard stem to aid various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. This work proposes a new unsupervised corpus-based stemmer that identifies the candidate suffixes using pivot word matching. Then candidate suffix statistics are used to remove the potential suffixes. After this, lexical similarity is measured to cluster the morphological related words. Finally, the smallest word in each cluster is designated as a stem. To quantify the performance of proposed method, two corpus-based and two linguistic knowledge-based stemmers for Urdu and English languages are used. The performance of each stemmer is evaluated on two different datasets for each language. The results show that the proposed PWMStem method outperforms the selected stemmers, achieving an accuracy of 0.876 for Urdu and 0.877 for English. To assess the performance of PWMStem through different aspects multiple evaluation metrics are used. The evaluation scores of other metrics are Index Compression Factor (ICF) = 73, Mean Number of Words per Conflation Class (MWC) = 3.7 for Urdu, and ICF = 71 and MWC = 3.5 for English. In the Urdu dataset, PWMStem achieved the lowest Under-stemming Index (UI) of 0.026479, Over-stemming Index (OI) of 0.000021, and an Error Rate Relative to Truncation (ERRT) of 0.610. In the English dataset, the values for UI, OI, and ERRT were measured as 0.102089, 0.000015, and 0.498, respectively.

Keywords

  • corpus-based stemming
  • morphology
  • natural language processing
  • Urdu stemmer
  • words inflection
JAIT-V14N4-863

How to Cite

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Abdul Jabbar, Manzoor Illahi, Sajid Iqbal, Amjad Rehman Khan, Narmine ElHakim, and Tanzila Saba, "PWMStem: A Corpus-Based Suffix Identification and Stripping Algorithm for Multi-lingual Stemming," Journal of Advances in Information Technology, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 863-875, 2023. https://doi.org/10.12720/jait.14.4.863-875

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

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