Re: Ideas to improve scoring

[Jon Trowbridge <trow novell com>]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 16:06 -0400, Kevin Kubasik wrote:
> Ok, so if I run a query for Environmental, I would hope to turn up
> something that might relate to the environment, the problem is, our
> search term isn't broken down. I tried at first to create a simple set
> of rules (like easy plurals, if a word ends in 's' run the query
> without the 's' as well etc) but there's really nothing universal.

This is called 'stemming', and is already implemented in Beagle.  We use
the Porter Stemmer provided by Lucene.  A description of the algorithm
is available at:
http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/

-J