limiting Search

Reply

JohnWetzig Posted: Sat, Oct 31 2009 7:32 AM

I'm a long-time user, but I cannot for the life of me remember how to search for "faithful" and not get every reference to "faith". Any suggestions?

Reply

RalphMauch Replied: Sat, Oct 31 2009 8:05 AM

Thomas Black:

On pc you can add nostem as a search parameter

That's correct, not sure why it would be different on a Mac... I still quite often, refer to the Libronix DSL Help module, especially for search parameters, but again, not sure that Mac users have the same tools.

nostem()

Stemming is the process by which a word is automatically reduced to its root form by stripping off common suffixes and prefixes. For example, “nationalism” is reduced to “national”, which is further reduced to “nation”. The word “nations” is also reduced to “nation”, so “nationalism” and “nations” have the same stem. By default, the Libronix DLS stems English queries, so searching for a word finds all words with the same stem. Note that this process is rule-based, so irregular forms such as “swim”, “swam”, and “swum” are considered to have different stems.

By default, a search for resume would find “resume”, “resumed”, “resumes”, “resuming”, and so on. The nostem() modifier turns off stemming. So, a search for nostem(resume) would not find the other forms of the word. However, the search would still find instances where the only difference is a difference in capitalization or accents. So a search for nostem(resume) would also find “resume”, “résumé”, “RESUME”, and so on.