  In this paper we present a rule-based stemming algorithm for the Uzbek
language. Uzbek is an agglutinative language, so many words are formed by
adding suffixes, and the number of suffixes is also large. For this reason, it
is difficult to find a stem of words. The methodology is proposed for doing the
stemming of the Uzbek words with an affix stripping approach whereas not
including any database of the normal word forms of the Uzbek language. Word
affixes are classified into fifteen classes and designed as finite state
machines (FSMs) for each class according to morphological rules. We created
fifteen FSMs and linked them together to create the Basic FSM. A lexicon of
affixes in XML format was created and a stemming application for Uzbek words
has been developed based on the FSMs.
