Stemming

Stemming is a method for matching word variations. SearchBlox provides out-of-the-box stemming support for content in 37 languages and the option to enable/disable stemming on an individual document collection basis.

Enabling Stemming

• Stemming can be enabled or disabled in collection settings as in the screenshot.
• By default, the stemming will be enabled in collections.
• Clear and Index the collection after the change.

Stemming in Search

• By enabling stemming, inflected words are reduced to a root form.
• Inflection refers to words taking different forms to express differences in tense, numbers, gender, etc. Most languages are inflected in this way.
• For example, running, runs and ran are the inflected forms of run.
• If a root word is searched, documents with inflected words and root words will be returned.
• When stemming is enabled, if you search for the word wonder, documents with wonders, wondering, wondered, wonderful, etc., will be returned as results.

• Similarly, searching for inflected words ("wondering") will list documents with root and inflected words in the results.

• When stemming is disabled, only the words searched, and not the inflected forms, will appear in the results.

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Important Information:

Stemming can be enabled or disabled in SearchBlox’s collection settings. After saving the changes made, the collection needs to be cleared and then re-indexed for it to take effect.