IStemmer.java

/*
 * Carrot2 project.
 *
 * Copyright (C) 2002-2016, Dawid Weiss, Stanisław Osiński.
 * All rights reserved.
 *
 * Refer to the full license file "carrot2.LICENSE"
 * in the root folder of the repository checkout or at:
 * http://www.carrot2.org/carrot2.LICENSE
 */

package org.carrot2.text.linguistic;

/**
 * Simple lemmatization engine transforming an inflected form of a word to its base form
 * or some other unique token.
 */
public interface IStemmer
{
    /**
     * Returns the base form of the provided word or <code>null</code> if the base form
     * cannot be determined. In the latter case, the base form will be assumed to be the
     * same as the original word.
     */
    public CharSequence stem(CharSequence word);
}