Could those "in the know" comment on my current understanding of stemming and stopwords using the snowball analyzer?
In my application, I am using the MoreLikeThis class to find similar documents to an input "text blob". There are words in the input text blob which are "uninteresting" for my application, so I create a list of these words. These words are "uninteresting" no matter what their tense or usage, for example, "develop", "developing", "developed", and "developer" are all uninteresting and I do not want them included in the search query created by the MoreLikeThis class. My index documents are stemmed using the Snowball analyzer. I do not use any stopwords when the documents are indexed (as I would like the choice of stopwords to be under user control at search time). I would like the user to be able to provide to the search application a list of "uninteresting" words, and for obvious reasons would like to force them to provide only, say, "developer" and have the application understand that all variants should be ignored (and I don't want to force them to try to guess what the stemmed version of "developer" is). My first try was to use MoreLikeThis with the Snowball analyzer and a simple list of unstemmed stopwords (MoreLikeThis.setAnalyzer and MoreLikeThis.setStopWords). However, it appears that the stopwords provided to the MoreLikeThis class are compared in an exact way to the token stream output by the Snowball filter (where the words have been stemmed), so "developer" will not match anything, and all variants pass through. Even if I provide the list of unstemmed stopwords to the snowball analyzer instead, they are used "as-is" with no stemming performed, so "developer" will not remove "developed". Apparently the following is necessary for my application: Construct a snowball analyzer with no stopwords. Use the unstemmed stopword list with the analyzer to construct a stemmed version of the set of stopwords. Use this set of stemmed stopwords as the stopwords input to the MoreLikeThis class (where the tokens are compared to the stemmed versions after been output from the Snowball analyzer). Is my understanding correct? Donna
