Stemming

Article summary

In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their word stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root. Algorithms for stemming have been studied in computer science since the 1960s. Many search engines treat words with the same stem as synonyms as a kind of query expansion, a process called conflation. A computer program or subroutine that stems word may be called a stemming program, stemming algorithm, or stemmer.

Key claims

1. publication date: 1968 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95
2. publication date: 1980 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95
3. release date: 2000 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. The record states that the publication date is "1968". What evidence would count against this claim?
3. The record states that the publication date is "1980". What evidence would count against this claim?
4. The record states that the release date is "2000". What evidence would count against this claim?
5. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
6. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1369011809