[Snowball-discuss] Doubt in Stem Search

[Martin Porter]

Vigneshwaran,

Hi, sorry to have been a week in replying. Your question often comes up
(hence the posting to snowball-discuss).

Comparatives and superlatives in English have too many exceptions for them
to be usefully put into a general rule for suffix removal. Think of,

winter center after aether elder ...

divest detest digest attest ...

The usual way to to 'soften' a rule like this in the Porter stemmer is to
make it applicable to longer words only -- typically, those that have at
least a two syllable stem. But the problem there is that in English the
comparative and superlative endings are only added to short adjectives
anyway. So we have bigger, larger, fatter, but not giganticer, immenser,
enormouser.

The problem can only be solved by building up special word lists of
adjectives that can take these endings.

Martin

At 09:09 PM 11/17/2009 -0800, mg.vigneshwaran at zac-ware.com wrote:
>
>Hai.
>
>In Porterstemmer class, there is a problem with Comparative and
>superlative verbs are not searched..
>
>For example:
>
>Fast Faster Fastest, when i search stem word fast and replace the stem
>words of fast means it replaces only "Fast" the remaining faster and
>faster not replaced.
>
>Can you tell how to check these...
>
>Thanks
>Vigneshwaran
>
>