Construction of a generic stopwords list for Hindi language without corpus statistics

Most of the research in the field of information retrieval (IR) has focused on the English language, but recently there has been a considerable amount of work and effort to develop IR systems for languages other than English. Research and experimentation in the field of IR in the Hindi language are relatively new and limited compared to the research that has been done in English, which has been dominant in the field of IR for a long while. A fundamental tool in IR is the employment of stop word lists. Stop words have no retrieval value in IR. Till now, many stop word lists have been developed for English, European and Chinese languages. However, there is no standard stop word list which has been constructed for Hindi language. In this paper an approach to construct a generic stop word list for Hindi language have been presented. Our list contains more than 800 stop words.