A STEMMING ALGORITHM FOR LATIN TEXT DATABASES

ROBYN SCHINKE; MARK GREENGRASS; ALEXANDER M. ROBERTSON; PETER WILLETT

doi:10.1108/eb026966

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Journal of Documentation

ISSN: 0022-0418

Online from: 1945

Subject Area: Library and Information Studies

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A STEMMING ALGORITHM FOR LATIN TEXT DATABASES

Document Information:
Title:	A STEMMING ALGORITHM FOR LATIN TEXT DATABASES
Author(s):	ROBYN SCHINKE, (Humanities Research Institute and Departments of History University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN), MARK GREENGRASS, (Humanities Research Institute and Departments of History University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN), ALEXANDER M. ROBERTSON, (Information Studies University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN), PETER WILLETT, (Information Studies University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TN)
Citation:	ROBYN SCHINKE, MARK GREENGRASS, ALEXANDER M. ROBERTSON, PETER WILLETT, (1996) "A STEMMING ALGORITHM FOR LATIN TEXT DATABASES", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 52 Iss: 2, pp.172 - 187
Article type:	General review
DOI:	10.1108/eb026966 (Permanent URL)
Publisher:	MCB UP Ltd
Abstract:	This paper describes the design of a stemming algorithm for searching databases of Latin text. The algorithm uses a simple longest-match approach with some recoding but differs from most stemmers in its use of two separate suffix dictionaries (one for nouns and adjectives and one for verbs) for processing query and database words. These dictionaries and the associated stemming rules are arranged in such a way that the stemmer does not need to know the grammatical category of the word that is being stemmed. It is very easy to overstem in Latin: the stemmer developed here tends, rather, towards understemming, leaving sufficient grammatical information attached to the stems resulting from its use to enable users to pursue very specific searches for single grammatical forms of individual words.

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