An Evaluation of Existing Light Stemming Algorithms for Arabic Keyword Searches
Brittany E. Rogerson · Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · 2019
The field of Information Retrieval recognizes the importance of stemming in improving retrieval effectiveness. This same tool, when applied to searches conducted in the Arabic language, increases the relevancy of documents returned and expands searches to encompass the general meaning of a word instead of the word itself. Since the Arabic language relies mainly on triconsonantal roots for verb forms and derives nouns by adding affixes, words with similar consonants are closely related in meaning. Stemming allows a search term to focus more on the meaning of a term and closely related terms and less on specific character matches. This paper discusses the strength of light stemming, the best techniques, and components for algorithmic affix-based stemmers used in keyword searching in the Arabic language.