Question

Using a web service or software library, I’d like to be able to discern words related by a root word (e.g., “seated” and “seatbelt” share the root word “seat” but “Seattle” wouldn’t be considered a match). Simple string comparison seems unfeasible for this sort of thing.

Short of defining my own dictionary, are there any libraries or web services that can not merely return word definitions, but return a word’s “root words” so I can perform this type of check?

Answer 1

Here is the Snowball stemmer for english.

you can use it as:

SF.Snowball.Ext.EnglishStemmer eng = new SF.Snowball.Ext.EnglishStemmer();
eng.SetCurrent("Seated");
eng.Stem();
Console.WriteLine(eng.GetCurrent()); //returns Seat