Developing an Urdu Lemmatizer

Abstract

Lemmatization is a process of obtaining root form of a given word. Lemmatizer is an important part of Natural Language Processing (NLP) toolkit and is essential for many NLP systems e.g. Information Retrieval (IR), plagiarism and text reuse detection, Information Extraction (IE), Machine Translation (MT), Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) etc. Urdu is a widely spoken language in the world, but very less work has been done on developing basic NLP tools for this language, one of them is Urdu lemmatizer. Since Urdu is a morphologically rich language and has words with many inflectional and derivational forms, development of an efficient lemmatizer is a challenging task and it will be useful for many Urdu NLP applications.