snowball ☆

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Description:
Stemming algorithms

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Developer tools

Tags: stemming nlp text-processing information-retrieval algorithm

Install: brew install snowball

About:
Snowball is a framework for creating stemming algorithms, primarily used in information retrieval and text processing. It provides a compiler and a series of highly optimized algorithms for various languages. Its main value proposition is offering a fast, robust, and standardized method for reducing words to their root form.

Key Features:

Compiler for creating stemming algorithms
Optimized algorithms for multiple languages
Lightweight and high-performance implementation
Standard for academic and commercial search engines

Use Cases:

Building search engine indexing pipelines
Improving keyword analysis in NLP applications
Text mining and document clustering

Alternatives:

Porter Stemmer – Snowball implements the Porter algorithm and extends it with more languages and improvements.
NLTK Stemmers – NLTK provides stemming in Python, often using Snowball as the backend engine.

Version History

Detected	Version	Rev	Change	Commit
Sep 11, 2024 4:55am		0	VERSION_BUMP	0a653a11
Sep 24, 2023 9:09pm		0	VERSION_BUMP	89c3b515