stem words before matching on them

[JonathanReeve]

using Lancaster stemmer?

[JonathanReeve]

It'd be really nice to find some kind of lemmatizer that regularizes verb forms, like "went" -> "go." But at the moment the Lancaster stemmer seems like the way to go, since it can regularize British and American spellings.

It's probably best to experiment with combinations of removing stopwords and stemming, since it looks like the Lancaster stemmer stems "theatre" to "the," and "the" remains unchanged, so there could be a false positive on a match containing words like this.