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itfrombit / PorterStemmer

A simple ObjC wrapper around the Porter Stemmer algorithm
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Is there a license for this? #1

Closed fletcher closed 12 years ago

fletcher commented 12 years ago

I apologize for using the issues for this, but github removed their messaging feature, and I didn't see a web page or email address for you on your profile.

I am looking for a stemmer to use in a few projects, and was wondering what under which license this project can be used?

Thanks!!

Fletcher

itfrombit commented 12 years ago

Hi Fletcher,

Sorry for not being clearer with the licensing. I threw the obj-c wrapper around this in a hurry when I needed it for a project and didn't think about the licensing part.

The main stemming source file (porter.c) was written by Martin Porter. See http://tartarus.org/martin/PorterStemmer for details. His original "license" was "all these encodings of the algorithm can be used free of charge for any purpose". He later clarified that to mean "never more restrictive than the BSD License."

I'll keep the same licensing on my (mostly trivial) obj-c wrapper. Use it however you like free of charge. I'll add a BSD license file to the repository to make the licensing clear.

BTW, if you're still shopping around for stemmers, you might also want to consider Martin's newer Snowball stemmer: http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/english/stemmer.html The generated C code is uglier, but there are some improvements over this original version.

Best, Jeff

fletcher commented 12 years ago

Jeff,

Thanks for the information,

I saw the Snowball package, but for now I was simply looking for something that somewhat worked and was ready to be thrown into a project. I had a basic model set up with perl previously, and was looking to replicate this in Objective-C for possible inclusion in an iOS app. Even in really basic testing on really simple text files, including a simple stoplist and this stemmer had an obvious impact in improving search results using a vector space approach. (I am probably butchering the terminology, but hopefully the point is clear.)

In any event, my initial perl approach was somewhat described here (and in a few of the "Similar pages" at the bottom):

http://fletcherpenney.net/2009/12/new_tag_feature_enabled

Thanks again!

Fletcher