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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2790–2793Cite as

Stemming

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Synonyms

Suffix stripping; Suffixing; Affix removal; Word conflation

Definition

Stemming is a process by which word endings or other affixes are removed or modified in order that word forms which differ in non-relevant ways may be merged and treated as equivalent. A computer program which performs such a transformation is referred to as a stemmer or stemming algorithm. The output of a stemming algorithm is known as a stem.

Historical Background

The need for stemming first arose in the field of information retrieval (IR), where queries containing search terms need to be matched against document surrogates containing index terms. With the development of computer-based systems for IR, the problem immediately arose that a small difference in form between a search term and an index term could result in a failure to retrieve some relevant documents. Thus, if a query used the term “explosion” and a document was indexed by the term “explosives,” there would be no match on this term (whether or...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    Chris D. Paice

Authors
  1. Chris D. Paice
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Paice, C.D. (2009). Stemming. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_942

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