Dear Reinhard
What are you writing?
An important point about stopwords is that they may not be in the
single word indexes (of whatever application you are searching,) and
therefore cannot be searched.
Usually words are designated as stopwords when they are so common that
they would result in too many records being retrieved.
Of course it helps when "&, and, or, not, andnot, " etc are designated
as stopwords!
Regards
Mike Curston
______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: What is a stopword?
Author: Reinhard Wentz <[log in to unmask]> at Internet
Date: 24/08/2000 17:17
Dear Colleagues,
would anybody have a handy generalizable definition of 'stopwords'?
- Terms which are not searched on most databases?
- Terms with no meaning of their own; function only as part of the sentence
syntax?
- SilverPlatter: 'Words of little intrinsic meaning that appear too
frequently to
be useful in searching text are known as "stopwords.' Why is 'mug' a
stopword for
SilverPlatter?
- Terms which are just noise, never a signal?
- Terms with no descriminatory power?
It depends I suppose a bit on the context; one may well have 'the' in the
index of pronouns ...
I would be grateful for any suggestions.
Reinhard
*************************************************************
Reinhard Wentz, Dipl. Bibl. Tel. 020 7905 2291
Cochrane Injuries Group Fax. 020 7242 2723 (Attn: R. Wentz)
Institute of Child Health e-mail [log in to unmask]
30, Guilford Street
London WC1N 1EH
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