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stemmer

stemmer


  2  definitions  found 
 
  From  Webster's  Revised  Unabridged  Dictionary  (1913)  [web1913]: 
 
  Stemmer  \Stem"mer\,  n. 
  One  who  or  that  which  stems  (in  any  of  the  senses  of  the 
  verbs). 
 
  From  The  Free  On-line  Dictionary  of  Computing  (13  Mar  01)  [foldoc]: 
 
  stemmer 
 
  science,  human  language>  A  program  or  {algorithm} 
  which  determines  the  morphological  root  of  a  given  inflected 
  (or,  sometimes  derived)  word  form  --  generally  a  written  word 
  form 
 
  A  stemmer  for  English,  for  example,  should  identify  the 
  {string}  cats"  (and  possibly  "catlike",  catty"  etc.)  as 
  based  on  the  root  "cat",  and  "stemmer",  "stemming",  stemmed" 
  as  based  on  "stem". 
 
  English  stemmers  are  fairly  {trivial}  (with  only  occasional 
  problems,  such  as  dries"  being  the  third-person  singular 
  present  form  of  the  verb  "dry",  axes"  being  the  plural  of 
  ax"  as  well  as  "axis");  but  stemmers  become  harder  to  design 
  as  the  morphology,  orthography,  and  {character  encoding}  of 
  the  target  language  becomes  more  complex.  For  example,  an 
  Italian  stemmer  is  more  complex  than  an  English  one  (because 
  of  more  possible  verb  inflections),  a  Russian  one  is  more 
  complex  (more  possible  noun  declensions),  a  Hebrew  one  is  even 
  more  complex  (a  {hairy}  writing  system),  and  so  on 
 
  Stemmers  are  common  elements  in  {query}  systems,  since  a  user 
  who  runs  a  query  on  daffodils"  probably  cares  about  documents 
  that  contain  the  word  daffodil"  (without  the  s). 
 
  ({This  dictionary}  has  a  rudimentary  stemmer  which  currently 
  (April  1997)  handles  only  conversion  of  plurals  to  singulars). 
 
  (1997-04-09)