Rule based stemmer in Urdu

Urdu is a combination of several languages like Arabic, Hindi, English, Turkish, Sanskrit etc. It has a complex and rich morphology. This is the reason why not much work has been done in Urdu language processing. Stemming is used to convert a word into its respective root form. In stemming, we separate the suffix and prefix from the word. It is useful in search engines, natural language processing and word processing, spell checkers, word parsing, word frequency and count studies. This paper presents a rule based stemmer for Urdu. The stemmer that we have discussed here is used in information retrieval. We have also evaluated our results by verifying it with a human expert.