A stemming framework for combining stemming algorithms together in a multilingual environment to obtain improved stemming behavior over any individual stemming algorithm, together with a new language independent stemming algorithm based on shortest path techniques. The stemmer essentially treats the stemming problem as a simple instance of the shortest path problem where the cost for each path can be computed from its word component and its number of characters. The goal of the stemmer is to find the shortest path to construct the entire word. The stemmer uses dynamic dictionaries constructed as lexical analyzer state transition tables to recognize the various allowable word parts for any given language in order to obtain maximum speed. The stemming framework provides the necessary logic to combine multiple stemmers in parallel and to merge their results to obtain the best behavior. Mapping dictionaries handle irregular plurals, tense, phrase mapping and proper name recognition.