Stemming of Amharic Words for Information Retrieval

This paper presents a stemmer for processing document and query words to facilitate searching databases of Amharic text. An iterative stemmer has been developed that involves the removal of both prefixes and suffixes and that also takes account of letter inconsistency and reiterative verb forms. Application of the stemmer to a test file of 1221 words suggested that appropriate stems were generated for ca. 95 per cent of them, with only limited overstemming and understemming.

[1]  Emmon W. Bach.  Is Amharic an SOV Language , 1970 .

[2]  Wessel Kraaij,et al.  Evaluation of a Dutch stemming algorithm , 1994 .

[3]  C. H. Armbruster.  Initia Amharica: An Introduction to spoken Amharic, Part I , 1920 .

[4]  Rainer Voigt,et al.  THE CLASSIFICATION OF CENTRAL SEMITIC , 1987 .

[5]  Julie Beth Lovins,et al.  Development of a stemming algorithm , 1968, Mech. Transl. Comput. Linguistics.

[6]  Kemal Oflazer,et al.  Design and Implementation of a Spelling Checker for Turkish , 1993 .

[7]  Peter Willett,et al.  Processing of Documents and Queries in a Slovene Language Free Text Retrieval System , 1990 .

[8]  Tengku Mohd Tengku Sembok,et al.  Experiments with a stemming algorithm for Malay words , 1996 .

[9]  N. Alemayehu Lakew.  Development of a stemming algorithm for Amharic language text retrieval , 1999 .

[10]  T. Kalamboukis.  Suffix stripping with modern Greek , 1995 .

[11]  Hailu Fulass.  Notes on the Verbal Noun and Possession Markers , 1968 .

[12]  Martin F. Porter,et al.  An algorithm for suffix stripping , 1997, Program.

[13]  Peter Willett,et al.  An evaluation of some conflation algorithms for information retrieval , 1981 .

[14]  Jacques Savoy,et al.  Stemming of French Words Based on Grammatical Categories , 1993, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[15]  R. Hetzron.  PRONOMINALIZATION IN AMHARIC , 1966 .

[16]  William B. Frakes,et al.  Stemming Algorithms , 1992, Information Retrieval: Data Structures & Algorithms.

[17]  Chris D. Paice,et al.  Another stemmer , 1990, SIGF.

[18]  Robert Krovetz,et al.  Viewing morphology as an inference process , 1993, Artif. Intell..

[19]  Richard Sproat,et al.  Morphology and computation , 1992 .

[20]  M. Lionel Bender,et al.  Amharic verb morphology : a generative approach , 1978 .