----- Message d'origine ----
De : Hugh Cayless <[log in to unmask]>
À : [log in to unmask]
Envoyé le : Lundi, 25 Août 2008, 4h11mn 13s
Objet : Re: [DIGITALCLASSICIST] Stopwords for Latin?

I don't know of one, and I wonder whether anyone's ever seen a need 
for one.  Stopwords can help as a sort of performance optimization in 
search engines with a restricted set of use cases, but once you get 
beyond a certain domain limit, they just aren't useful (you can search 
for 'a' on Google for an example of what I mean).  Philologists are 
often very interested in words that might get dropped by a stopword 
list.  I might want to find particular uses of 'et' for example, and 
be very irritated if the results told me I couldn't.

I've implemented search engines a few times now and honestly never had 
a use for stopwords in the end for any of them.  I sort of don't 
believe in them anymore...so my question would be: what's the use 
case, and do you really need one?

Hope this helps,
Hugh

On Aug 24, 2008, at 6:28 PM, Neven Jovanović wrote:

> Hello,
>
> does anybody know where could one look for a list of stop words for 
> Latin?
> I have seen an English stop words list on Perseus
> (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/engstop.html), but have not been 
> able
> to find anything similar for Latin.  Yes, the Dartmouth Dante
> (http://dante.dartmouth.edu/help.php) mentions "stopword list" for 
> Latin,
> but does not make it available.
>
> It seems that such a list is something that always gets compiled from
> scratch.  Perhaps a version of it, made freely available, could be a
> welcome contribution to the Digital Classicist wiki.
>
> (Not to mention a Greek stop word list...)
>
> Yours,
>
> Neven Jovanovic
>
> Zagreb, Hrvatska / Croatia