About

To stem words is to remove word endings like -s and -ing.

Stemming is replacing words with their stems.

Stemming is the process of reducing search tokens to their root (or “stem”)

A search for different type of a word will still yield results.

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Example

For instance

• “bikes” is replaced with “bike”; now query “bike” can find both documents containing “bike” and those containing “bikes”.
• “search”, “searching” and “searched” can all be reduced to the stem “search”.

Algorithm

SnowBall is a good stemming algorithm.

• See the attribute filter StringsToWordVector in Weka

Documentation / Reference

• wiki/Word_stem