Overview of stemming and thesaurus

The Oracle Endeca Server supports stemming and thesaurus features that allow keyword search queries to match text containing alternate forms of the query terms or phrases.

The definitions of these features are as follows:

The stemming feature allows the system to consider alternate forms of individual words as equivalent for the purpose of search query matching. For example, it is often desirable for singular nouns to match their plural equivalents in the searchable text, and vice versa.
The thesaurus feature allows the system to return matches for related concepts to words or phrases contained in user queries. For example, a thesaurus entry may allow searches for Mark Twain to match text containing the phrase Samuel Clemens.

Both the thesaurus and stemming features rely on defining equivalent textual forms that are used to match user queries to searchable text data. Because these features are based on similar concepts, and because they are typically configured to operate in conjunction to achieve desired query matching effects, both features and their interactions are discussed in one section.