What does stemming & language features mean?

You can enable/disable Stemming & Language Features in Spotler Activate Search via Preferences in the Advanced Site Search settings. 

2024-11-29_14h34_26.png

Stemming attempts to reduce words to stems, such as a map being a stem of mapping and maps. This is, naturally, language-dependent. We primarily use the Snowball Porter stemming algorithm. There are multiple languages supported by this in Solr, including English and Dutch. But for some languages, such as Arabic, we use other language specific out-of-the-box stemmers. We do not use any custom stemming algorithms.

However, in some instances, words cannot be stemmed or can be stemmed incorrectly. This is because language rules are not consistent, and thus very difficult to implement programmatic stemming for all words. Some Dutch words with non-standard pluralization (and some of the obscure compound words) do not stem correctly and can produce some genuinely weird results. CJK (Chinese, Japanese amd Korean) languages cannot be stemmed.