Lemmatization, finding the basic morphological form of a word in a corpus, is an important step in many natural language processing tasks when working with morphologically rich languages. We describe and evaluate Nefnir, a new open source lemmatizer for Icelandic. Nefnir uses suffix substitution rules, derived from a large morphological database, to lemmatize tagged text. Evaluation shows that for correctly tagged text, Nefnir obtains an accuracy of 99.55 , and for text tagged with a PoS tagger, the accuracy obtained is 96.88 .
Machine learning methods emerged to make the rule-learning process more effective, and various algorithms have been developed. These methods rely on training data, which can be a corpus of words and their lemmas or a large morphological lexicon @cite_6 . By analyzing the training data, transformation rules are formed, which can subsequently be used to find lemmas in new texts, given the word forms.
@cite_6
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We propose a method to automatically train lemmatization rules that handle prefix, infix and suffix changes to generate the lemma from the full form of a word. We explain how the lemmatization rules are created and how the lemmatizer works. We trained this lemmatizer on Danish, Dutch, English, German, Greek, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Slovene and Swedish full form-lemma pairs respectively. We obtained significant improvements of 24 percent for Polish, 2.3 percent for Dutch, 1.5 percent for English, 1.2 percent for German and 1.0 percent for Swedish compared to plain suffix lemmatization using a suffix-only lemmatizer. Icelandic deteriorated with 1.9 percent. We also made an observation regarding the number of produced lemmatization rules as a function of the number of training pairs.