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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]: stemmerscience, 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)
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