Is there a good stemmer for Hebrew?

Question

I am looking for a good stemmer for Hebrew - I found nothing at all using Google...

On the HebMorph site it says that:

Stem and Lemma originally have different meanings, but for Semitic languages they seem to be used interchangeably.

Does that mean that for NLP purposes, I could use lemmas instead of stems? Keeping in mind that: Stemmers are much simpler, smaller and usually faster then lemmatizers, and for many applications their results are good enough. Using a lemmatizer for that is a waste of resources. (source )

Thank you.

Moen

possible duplicate of Lucene Hebrew analyzer – Enplane

I don't know how you didn't find anything in Google. wiki.apache.org/solr/LanguageAnalysis#Hebrew and code.google.com/p/hebstem and github.com/synhershko/HebMorph – Enplane

Yeah I also saw that 'hebstem' site, but I couldn't find anything downloadable there. And with HebMorph - I didn't see anything about stemming. It's there that I saw that they use the terms 'lemma' and 'stem' interchangeably. I'm now checking the SOLR page, I didn't see that one before. Thanks. – Moen

Answer 1

In Hebrew both stemmer and lemmatizer are complex - you cannot just trim letters from the word according to ending of a word like in porter stemmer...

Regarding an existing implementation of a lemmatizer you can try http://hebrew-nlp.co.il currently in beta and it is free

Custodian