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Developing Morphological Analysers for South Asian Languages: Experimenting with the Hindi and Gujarati Languages

A considerable amount of work has been put into development of stemmers and morphological analysers. The majority of these approaches use hand-crafted suffix-replacement rules but a few try to discover such rules from corpora. While most of the approaches remove or replace suffixes, there are examples of derivational stemmers which are based on prefixes as well. In this paper we present a rule-based morphological analyser. We propose an approach that takes both prefixes as well as suffixes into account. Given a corpus and a dictionary, our method can be used to obtain a set of suffix-replacement rules for deriving an inflected word’s root form. We developed an approach for the Hindi language but show that the approach is portable, at least to related languages, by adapting it to the Gujarati language. Given that the entire process of developing such a ruleset is simple and fast, our approach can be used for rapid development of morphological analysers and yet it can obtain competitive results with analysers built relying on human authored rules.