[Snowball-discuss] Tweak stemmer: (say the German stemmer)

[Martin Porter]

Santosh,

(I hope I understand your email correctly. Anyway, here goes with an
answer ...)

The stemmers do not replace the language specific characters with
'English' equivalents as a standard operation, but will occasionally
remove accents as part of the stemming process. For example, in German,
removal of umlaut in the last syllable will help conflate singular and
plural forms. The German eszet (double s) is similarly usefully replaced
by 'ss'. 

If you feel that the normalisation is incorrect, the solution is to
modify the snowball scripts and recompile.

Incidentally we have also had the opposite suggestion to your own, that,
in Spanish for example, it would be be better for the stemmer to remove
ALL accents, since their use is not so very consistent in the written
language.

Italian acute/grave usage is very variable, and the Snowball Italian
stemmer maps both to the same form. 

But the general approach in the Snowball stemmers is to leave accents
alone unless their is a clear reason for removing or altering them.

Martin




On Sat, 2007-10-06 at 14:28 +0530, Santosh Pai wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  
> 
> Using the snowball stemmer is providing me with great results.
> 
> I had a question though…
> 
>  
> 
> For some languages (say German, French), the stemmer replaces the
> special language specific characters with corresponding English
> equivalents
> 
> For eg in German:
> 
>  
> 
> ä àa
> 
> ö ào
> 
> ü àu
> 
> Ä àA
> 
> Ö àO
> 
> Ü àU
> 
> ß àss”
> 
>  
> 
> Is there a way to preserve the special characters in the stems?
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>    Santosh Pai                        
> 
> 
> 6th Floor, Windsor
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> 
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> 
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> 
> 
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> 
> Mobile : 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> santosh at quagnito.com
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> 
> 
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> 
> 
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