[Xapian-discuss] Giving a choice of stemming

[Francis Irving]

On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 04:01:06AM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> Most seem to like it (or don't notice!)
> 
> Pretty much all the negative comments I've heard are with searching for
> names - the scheme described above is aimed at addressing that.
> 
> The other negative stemming comment is when using relevance feedback:
> 
> http://www.xapian.org/search.php?P=postlist
> 
> People don't like the stemmed terms which appear (e.g. "calcul." in this
> example).  Omega tries quite hard to avoid these (notice that many of
> the suggested words don't have a trailing dot, so they aren't stemmed
> forms) but without building an "unstem" map from the source data, it
> can't always manage to avoid stemmed forms.
> 
> Academic studies also favour stemming.

Thanks Olly.  I'm not sure what we'll do yet, but I'm pretty sure I
understand what Xapian can do.

The other thing which is a pain is highlighting search terms in
extracts.  Doable, but a bit messy.

Francis