Computer Science meets the Real world - Stemming

Not quite as well known as say the Soundex algorithm, stemming is a technique that removes the endings off words in English (mainly but there are equivalents in other languages) to get to the root of the word. For example "fishing", "fished", "fish", and "fisher" are all based on "fish". It's not an exact process as English is not an exactly defined language but has evolved over many centuries.

A British computer sciemtist Dr. Martin Porter devised the Porter Stemming Algorithm which is widely used and implemented in a variety of programming languages, which include C and C# and which I've linked in thee relevant code libraries. You are free to use this in your code as you wish though it would be nice to let him know if you do.

• Link to C Code Library
• Link to C# Code Library