temper

n 1: a sudden outburst of anger; "his temper sparked like damp

firewood" [syn: {pique}, {irritation}]

2: a characteristic (habitual or relatively temporary) state of

feeling; "whether he praised or cursed me depended on his

temper at the time"; "he was in a bad humor" [syn: {mood},

{humor}, {humour}]

3: a disposition to exhibit uncontrolled anger; "his temper was

well known to all his employees" [syn: {biliousness}, {irritability},

{peevishness}, {pettishness}, {snappishness}, {surliness}]

4: the elasticity and hardness of a metal object; its ability

to absorb considerable energy before cracking [syn: {toughness}]

v 1: anneal or toughen by a process of gradually heating and

cooling; "temper glass" [syn: {anneal}]

2: harden by reheating and cooling in oil; "temper steel" [syn:

{harden}]

3: adjust the pitch (of pianos)

4: make more temperate, acceptable, or suitable by adding

something else; moderate; "she tempered her criticism"

[syn: {season}]

5: restrain or temper [syn: {chasten}, {moderate}]

stemmer

A program or {algorithm}

which determines the morphological root of a given inflected

(or, sometimes, derived) word form -- generally a written word

form.

A stemmer for English, for example, should identify the

{string} "cats" (and possibly "catlike", "catty" etc.) as

based on the root "cat", and "stemmer", "stemming", "stemmed"

as based on "stem".

English stemmers are fairly {trivial} (with only occasional

problems, such as "dries" being the third-person singular

present form of the verb "dry", "axes" being the plural of

"ax" as well as "axis"); but stemmers become harder to design

as the morphology, orthography, and {character encoding} of

the target language becomes more complex. For example, an

Italian stemmer is more complex than an English one (because

of more possible verb inflections), a Russian one is more

complex (more possible noun declensions), a Hebrew one is even

more complex (a {hairy} writing system), and so on.

Stemmers are common elements in {query} systems, since a user

who runs a query on "daffodils" probably cares about documents

that contain the word "daffodil" (without the s).

({This dictionary} has a rudimentary stemmer which currently

(April 1997) handles only conversion of plurals to singulars).

(1997-04-09)