Hey Scott,
On Dec 19, 2003, at 3:12 PM, Scott MacMaster wrote:
Another things to consider is gender. If I do a search on 'este' (this, masculine) I probably would want matches on 'esta' (this, feminine). On the other hand 'este' also means east and for that meaning it has no gender. Maybe it would be best to have an 'ignore gender' checkbox on the search panel. Hopefully, no one thinks we're suggesting that people ignore men or women and sues us for being discrimiative. :)
You're mixing completely different topics here. Collation only refers
to character match and order - it (usually, some languages define a
sort order depending on words as well) has nothing to do with words or
anything in that regard.
To implement something like you want, you would need to morphologically
analyze the text, and you'd most often need a complete lexicon of the
language to do that. After this, you would use the collation services
to see if the words match (in their morphologically reduced form).
I am aware that the one algorithm would be significantly more complex but I
wouldn't say they are completely different. They are both searches with a
set of rules that differ somewhat. When the topic of searching was
mentioned my mind first went to the idea of searching for text in a
document. However, for other types of searches, possibly searching for a
file, a more exact search algorithm may be better. Still, I think it would
be somewhat unintuitive to type "este or esta" in the search string if I'm
not certain what gender the filename uses.
Later, Scott MacMaster
