stemmer - Definitions from Dictionary.com

5 results for: stemmer

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This

stem·mer1

Audio Help [stem-er] Pronunciation Key

–noun

1.	a person who removes stems.

2.	a device for removing stems, as from tobacco, grapes, etc.

[Origin: 1890–95; stem¹ + -er¹

]

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
stemmer

To learn more about stemmer visit Britannica.com

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This

stem·mer2

Audio Help [stem-er] Pronunciation Key

–noun

an implement for stemming or tamping.

[Origin: 1855–60; stem² + -er¹

]

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

WordNet - Cite This Source - Share This

stemmer
noun
1.	a worker who strips the stems from moistened tobacco leaves and binds the leaves together into books [syn: stripper]
2.	a worker who makes or applies stems for artificial flowers
3.	an algorithm for removing inflectional and derivational endings in order to reduce word forms to a common stem
4.	a miner's tamping bar for ramming packing in over a blasting charge
5.	a device for removing stems from fruit (as from grapes or apples)

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing - Cite This Source - Share This

stemmer information 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)