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ixStemEnglishWord

NAME

ixStemEnglishWord -- Perform a Porter stemming of an English word.

SYNOPSIS

ixStemEnglishWord(char *StemmedWord, char *Word)

ARGUMENTS

*StemmedWord -- A pointer to a buffer where the stemmed word will be placed.  This buffer should be at least as long as the original word's buffer.

*Word -- A pointer to a NULL terminated English word.

RETURNS

Nothing.

DESCRIPTION

ixStemEnglishWord performs what is called "stemming" on a word which is in the English language.  Stemming tries to reduce all forms of a word to a single unified form.  For example "Running" becomes "Run".  However, the results from the stemming may or may not be a real English word.  Stemming is usually performed at indexing time and at query time.  Stemming can reduce the size of an index dramatically  for Record and IDF level indexes as it reduces the number of terms in the index's wordlist.  Stemming also makes it easy for users to search for all forms of a word easily.  However, since the resulting stemmed word is not necessarily a "real" word, stemming may or may not make sense if you are planning on showing the wordlist to the end user.

SEE ALSO

ixIndexWord, ixIndexWordEx