[Snowball-discuss] Fix common typo in Spanish

[Damian Janowski]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Martin Porter
<martin.f.porter at gmail.com> wrote:
> Damian,
>
> Sorry to have been a while in replying, but I wanted first to unearth
> the previous occasion when this came up in snowball-discuss.

No problem at all, thank you for your reply.

> You have to go to,
>
> http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.snowball
>
> then to page 4, and look at the messages from and to Andrew Green in
> May 2007. It was left so that a version of the stemmer for Spanish
> which does not assume accents on endings was something we'd
> investigate. But we have not put one in place on the snowball site. I
> suppose I was always hoping one might be contributed by a native
> Spanish speaker, which would give the variant stemmer a little more
> authority. It is not of course difficult to add the extra endings in,
> but the choice of endings, I guess, needs care. One is dealing with a
> modern use of Spanish which is not strictly grammatical.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm a native Spanish speaker building a
website in Latin America so I'm sure I'll have some insights to
contribute.

As you say, there is a need for a stemmer which accounts for
informally written Spanish.

> Are there not indeed a batch of endings one needs to consider? Do you
> think the single one you instance ---
>
>     'aci{o'}n' 'acion'
>
> --- is of especial importance?

I'll definitely investigate if there are more of these. The ending
'-ación' is equivalent to the English '-ation', so it's quite
important and I've already seen too many misspellings of these. But
again, I agree it's wiser to group a batch of changes before applying.

I'll keep you posted.

Thank you again for your time!