PyStemmer
=========

What is PyStemmer?
------------------

  PyStemmer is a Python interface to the stemming algorithms from the Snowball
  project (http://snowball.tartarus.org/). A stemming algorithm (or stemmer) is
  a process for removing the commoner morphological and inflexional endings
  from words in English. Its main use is as part of a term normalisation
  process that is usually done when setting up Information Retrieval systems.
  A stemmer aims to conflate words with the same linguistic base form, in order
  that the resulting "stem" may be considered to represent all words with that
  base form.

  Stemmers can be used to make searches more comprehensive. For example,
  stemming can ensure that a search for 'cars' will also find all documents
  that contain only 'car'.

  Snowball is a small string processing language designed for creating stemming
  algorithms for use in Information Retrieval.  It is also the name of a
  project to develop a good base set of stemming algorithms.

  PyStemmer uses the "libstemmer_c" C interface to the snowball algorithms,
  provided by the snowball project itself.  This library is unmodified, but
  contained within the PyStemmer distribution.  If you wish to upgrade
  PyStemmer to a more recent version of libstemmer_c (or the snowball
  algorithms), it should suffice to download a new copy of libstemmer_c from
  the snowball project, and replace the contents of the libstemmer_c
  subdirectory with the contents of the download.

Requirements
------------

  This version of PyStemmer has been tested using Python version 2.6.4, but
  should work with earlier versions.

Installation
------------

  The snowball stemming algorithms are included in the PyStemmer distribution,
  and PyStemmer uses distutils, so all that is neccessary to build and install
  PyStemmer is the usual distutils invocation:

    python setup.py build
    python setup.py install

API
---

  PyStemmer's API is documented by documentation comments, which may
  conveniently be viewed using the epydoc output present in the docs/html/
  subdirectory.

  A brief overview can be found in docs/quickstart.txt

License
-------

  PyStemmer is copyright (c) 2006, Richard Boulton, and is licensed under
  the MIT license: see the file "LICENSE" for the full text of this.  It is
  was inspired by an earlier implementation (which was copyright (c) 2001,
  Andreas Jung, and also licensed under the MIT license, but no portions of
  which remain in this package, and had a different API).

  The snowball algorithms, and the snowball library, are copyright (c)
  2001-2006, Dr Martin Porter and Richard Boulton, and are licensed under
  the BSD license.