LALITHA: A light weight Malayalam stemmer using suffix stripping method

Stemming is the process of removing the affixes from inflections and to return the root form. Malayalam is highly agglutinative in nature and hundreds of inflections are possible for each word. An effective stemmer in Malayalam is not yet implemented. This paper presents a lightweight stemmer for Malayalam, which conflates terms by suffix removal. The proposed stemmer is both computationally inexpensive and domain independent and will serve as a vital part in many areas of Malayalam Language Computing.