Snowball is a small string processing language designed for creating stemming
algorithms for use in Information Retrieval. This site describes Snowball, and presents
several useful stemmers which have been implemented using it.
(Since it effectively provides a ‘suffix STRIPPER GRAMmar’, I had toyed with the
idea of calling it ‘strippergram’, but good sense has prevailed, and so it is
‘Snowball’ named as a tribute to SNOBOL, the excellent string handling language
of Messrs Farber, Griswold, Poage and Polonsky from the 1960s.
- Martin Porter)
Please address all technical Snowball-related mail to
snowball-discuss@lists.tartarus.org.
Any such mail sent directly to Martin Porter or Richard Boulton may be answered less
speedily, and in any case they reserve the right to post their answers on snowball-discuss.