Dictionary.net

a worker who makes or applies stems for artificial flowers

A program or algorithmwhich determines the morphological root of a given inflected(or, sometimes, derived) word form -- generally a written wordform.A stemmer for English, for example, should identify thestring "cats" (and possibly "catlike", "catty" etc.) asbased on the root "cat", and "stemmer", "stemming", "stemmed"as based on "stem".English stemmers are fairly trivial (with only occasionalproblems, such as "dries" being the third-person singularpresent form of the verb "dry", "axes" being the plural of"ax" as well as "axis"); but stemmers become harder to designas the morphology, orthography, and character encoding ofthe target language becomes more complex. For example, anItalian stemmer is more complex than an English one (becauseof more possible verb inflections), a Russian one is morecomplex (more possible noun declensions), a Hebrew one is evenmore complex (a hairy writing system), and so on.Stemmers are common elements in query systems, since a userwho runs a query on "daffodils" probably cares about documentsthat contain the word "daffodil" (without the s). (This dictionary has a rudimentary stemmer which currently(April 1997) handles only conversion of plurals to singulars).