Stemming:
It is very likely that documents in this retrieval system are going to use different forms of a word, such as reproduces, reproducing,
and reproduced
The goal of stemming is to reduce various forms of a word to their common base form. For instance, the
result of applying stemming to the following text would be as follows:
the boy's cars are different colors ->
the boy car are differ color
This system makes use of the Porter's Stemming Algorithm.
Stopping:
Stopwords are words that are frequently occuring in a language, but which might not provide much meaning to a document in this system.
Enabling Stopping will make the system enforce Stopword Removal, that is, to remove stopwords from the query.
The following are the words of the English language considered as Stopwords by this system:
a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, s, such, t, that, the, their, then, there, these,
they, this, to, was, will, with
Synonyms:
The documents in the system may not contain the exact word from your query, but rather, a synonym of the word you have entered.
When enabling Synonyms,
the query is expanded to include synonyms of the words from the original query, thereby diversifying the potential number of words to be matched against documents
in the collection.
This system makes use of the WordNet thesaurus, found here.