A Light Weight Stemmer for Bengali and Its Use in Spelling Checker

Stemming is an operation that splits a word into the constituent root part and affix without doing complete morphological analysis. It is used to improve the performance of spelling checkers and information retrieval applications, where morphological analysi would be too computationally expensive. For spelling checkers specifically, using stemming may drastically reduce the dictionary size, often a bottleneck for mobile and embedded devices. This paper presents a computationally inexpensive stemming algorithm for Bengali, which handles suffix removal in a domain independent way. The evaluation of the proposed algorithm in a Bengali spelling checker indicates that it can be effectively used in information retrieval applications in general.