ookstemming

Ookstemming is a stemming technique designed for texts written in the constructed language Ook, and for related languages that exhibit reduplication and rich affixal morphology. The technique reduces words to a canonical base form, or lemma, to improve search, indexing, and linguistic analysis.

Origin and scope: The term was introduced in a small NLP project exploring conlangs in the early 2020s. Ookstemming extends traditional stemmers by incorporating language-specific rules for affixes, reduplicative patterns, and orthographic variants found in Ook. It is primarily used in academic experiments and community digital libraries of Ook texts.

Algorithm and design: The process typically involves (1) normalization to handle case, punctuation, and script variants, (2) tokenization that respects Ook morphology, (3) application of a rule set that strips common prefixes and suffixes to reveal base stems, (4) specialized handling of reduplication to collapse repeated morphemes into a single lemma, and (5) lexicon-based mapping to disambiguate homographs and select lemmas. A post-processing pass enforces consistency across related forms and integrates with a lexicon of Ook lemmas.

Variants and evaluation: Implementations range from lightweight, rule-based stemmers to hybrid systems that blend rules with statistical models. Evaluation typically reports precision, recall, and F1 against a manually annotated Ook corpus or against downstream tasks such as search and clustering.

Applications and limitations: Ookstemming supports efficient indexing of Ook texts, improves cross-form matching for retrieval, and aids linguistic research on conlang morphology. Limitations include limited corpora size, ambiguity in form-lemma mapping, and dependence on a comprehensive Ook lexicon. Ongoing work pursues better disambiguation, multilingual interop, and integration with lemmatization approaches.

See also: Stemming, Lemmatization, Information retrieval, Constructed language, Ook (the language).