[Snowball-discuss] Query Expansion with Snowball?

[Martin Porter]

Amit,

Yes, this is very much what stemming (and Snowball) is useful for. The
Snowball English stemmer does not conflate 'swam' with 'swim', but that
is all discussed in the introductory account.

Obviously there are many ways of using a stemmer to fit in with an IR
model. One way is to keep a relation of all words with stemmed forms,
(w, s), and expand by applying the projection w->s->w.

swimming -> swim -> swim, swims, swimming

Martin

On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 18:04 -0700, Amit Aggarwal wrote:
> Hello dear Snowball community,
>  
> I am looking for a query expansion tool in order to make searching
> better for my site. One way of doing this is to stem the word and then
> conflate the stem to get all variations of the word. For example,
>  
> user query: swimming
> 1. stem: swim
> 2. conflation: swim, swims, swimming, swam
>  
> I am curious if you think Snowball fits the bill for this job. I know
> it can do step 1, but has anybody out there tried to do step 2? 
>  
> If anybody knows of anything else that might be useful, please do
> share! 
>  
> Thanks.
> Amit
>  
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