A rule based stemmer for Sinhala language

Abstract

Stemming, as its word implies it converts the original word into its root/base format which is called as stem. Stemming process plays a prominent role in natural language processing (NLP) because it makes applications more efficient and effective. Though stemming is such an important task, it is hard to find a stemming method for Sinhalese language which is official language of Sri Lanka. There are common language analyzers which cannot be use for stemming since they are highly language dependent. In this paper, we present a rule-based stemming method by using suffix and prefix rules in Sinhalese language.