In this paper we describe the complexity of building a lemmatizer for Arabic which has a rich and complex morphology, and show some differences between lemmatization and surface stemming, i.e. removing prefixes and suffixes from words. We discuss the need for a fast and accurate lammatization to enhance Arabic Information Retrieval results. We also introduce a new dataset that can be used to test lemmatization accuracy, and an efficient lemmatization algorithm that outperforms state-of-the-art Arabic lemmatization in terms of accuracy and speed. We share the dataset and the code for research purposes.
@InProceedings{MUBARAK18.1079, author = {Hamdy Mubarak}, title = "{Build Fast and Accurate Lemmatization for Arabic}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper