Martin F. Porter is the inventor of the Porter Stemmer,[1] one of the most common algorithms for stemming English,[2][3] and the Snowball programming framework. His 1980 paper "An algorithm for suffix stripping", proposing the stemming algorithm, has been cited over 8000 times (Google Scholar).[4]

The Muscat search engine comes from research performed by Porter at the University of Cambridge and was commercialized in 1984 by Cambridge CD Publishing; it was subsequently sold to MAID which became the Dialog Corporation.[5] Part of Dialog was then spun off to become BrightStation in 2000,[6][7] which transitioned Open Muscat to a closed-source development model in 2001.[8] Subsequently, a group of developers led by Porter[9] initiated a project based on Open Muscat called Xapian and released the first official version on September 30, 2002.[10]

In 2000 he was awarded the Tony Kent Strix award.[11]

Porter read mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge (1963–66) and went to get a Diploma in Computer Science (1967) and a PhD. at Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He worked at the University of Leeds for a year before returning to Cambridge's Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (1971-1974) and at the Sedgwick Museum as a programmer (1974-1976). In 1977, he became the Director of the Museum Documentation Advisory Unit (MDA).[12]

Martin Porter is co-founder with John Snyder of the contextual targeting and content recommendation company, Grapeshot.[13] John Snyder is listed as CEO and Martin Porter is listed as Chief Scientist. Grapeshot took £250,000 in UK government subsidies and subsequently raised £16m from UK investors.[14] On May 15, 2018, Oracle Corporation completed the acquisition of Grapeshot.

References

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  1. ^ Porter Stemming Algorithm
  2. ^ Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze (2008). Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press.
  3. ^ Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin (2009). Speech and Language Processing. Pearson, p. 102.
  4. ^ Articles at Google Scholar, accessed 2012-02-09.
  5. ^ Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Consulting. "Smartlogik Discover (APR) - SearchTools Report". Searchtools.com. Retrieved 2012-02-09.
  6. ^ Rob Buckley (March 2001). "The Bayesian haze". infoconomy. Retrieved 2022-04-10.
  7. ^ Paul Farrelly (2000-09-23). "Bright at the end of the tunnel". The Guardian. Retrieved 2022-04-10.
  8. ^ "The Xapian Project: History". Retrieved 2022-04-10.
  9. ^ Porter, Martin (March 30, 2006). "Lovins Revisited". In Tait, John (ed.). Charting a New Course: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.: Essays in Honour of Karen Spärck Jones. Amsterdam: Kluwer: Springer Science & Business Media. p. 61. ISBN 9781402034671.
  10. ^ "Xapian Core NEWS". Retrieved 2022-04-10.
  11. ^ UKeiIG Tony Kent Strix Award Archived 2014-09-25 at the Wayback Machine (Accessed Feb 2012)
  12. ^ Museum, Vol XXX, n° 3/4, 1978, Museums and Computers p.224
  13. ^ Grapeshot (Accessed Oct 2012)
  14. ^ [1] Parliamentary Review 2018 - Grapeshot
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