IMHO, a 'stemmer' (being a specific 'thing') is exactly that. An algorithm for stemming. A database or lexicon is not referred to as a 'stemmer'. One can perform "stemming" using a lexicon if that's their need.
For me, its more than just stemming because some words have morphology totally separate from "stems" that need to be known in searching and NLP (e.g. verb conjugations). Maybe some call that stemming too, but I never have personally. On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 10:18 -0700, Chris Hostetter wrote: > : Regarding stemmers, I ditched them altogether a long time ago in favor > : of a dictionary of morphologies of all known words (for any given > : language). A simple lookup of any word morphology thus produces the set, > : including the correct stem. > > Strictly speaking: you haven't "ditched" stemmers altogether -- you've > ditched *algorithmic* stemmers and moved to a *dictionary* based stemmer > -- but it's still a stemmer. > > (i just don't want people reading this thread to be confused about > terminology) > > > -Hoss >
