Simple Stemming Rules for Arabic Language

Processing of Arabic language is eminent for the fact that currently the number of computer and Internet users in the Arab word is growing tremendously. The problem of stemming is very important in information retrieval, knowledge mining and language processing. Arabic has very complex morphology and stemming rules that must deal with many specific properties of Arabic. This paper describes very simple rules for stemming of Arabic words. Two of these rules are universal, i.e. they are applicable to any word category, and one rule for each of the four categories: nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. The rules were more successful in case of adverbs. As for nouns, verbs and adjectives, some errors occurred especially in case of suffix processing.