Stemming of French words based on grammatical categories

Jacques Savoy

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1993, vol. 44, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Automatic indexing systems use suffix stripping algorithms to cluster various words derived from a common root under the same stem. Currently, removing affixes to either a context‐free or context‐sensitive operation, where the context refers to the remaining stem. In this article, we propose a suffixing algorithm which uses grammatical categories to enhance the stemming process. This approach supports the use of foreign languages. In our case, the language is French, and a morphological analysis is required for removing inflectional suffixes or morphosyntactic variants of a lemma. After this analysis, we implement a suffix stripping algorithm which uses a dictionary and the grammatical categories to remove derivational suffixes. Our approach always returns a linguistically correct lemma, but not necessarily the “right” one. Based on our tests, this solution is an attractive one, with a mean error rate of 16%. We finish by explaining why we cannot expect significantly better results with this approach. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Date: 1993
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https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199301)44:13.0.CO;2-1

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamest:v:44:y:1993:i:1:p:1-9

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