Teaching career
Christopher D Paice was a member of the School of Computing and Communications (SCC) atThe Paice-Husk Stemming Algorithm
The Paice-Husk Stemmer was developed by Chris D Paice with the assistance of Gareth Husk in the Computing Department at Lancaster University, in the late 1980s, it features an externally stored set of stemming rules, and this flexibility over the Porter stemmer made it of interest to several researchers. Originally implemented in Pascal programming language, further implementations have been made using ANSI C and Java. A Perl version was implemented by Mary Taffet at the Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University, USA. The stemmer consists of a stemming algorithm and a separate set of stemming rules. The standard set of rules provides a 'strong' stemmer. Stemmer strength is a quality that is advantageous for index compression, however, it produce a larger number of Overstemming errors relative to the number of Understemming errors; users who need a lighter stemmer can easily develop their own set of rules. The Stemmer is iterative (i.e. endings are removed piecemeal in an indefinite number of stages) and the rules may specify the removal or replacement of an ending. The replacement technique avoids the need for a separate stage in the process to recode or provide partial matching; this helps maintain the efficiency of the algorithm. The rules are indexed by the last letter of the ending to allow efficient searching.Stemmer Evaluation
Apart from the Stemmer itself, Chris Paice developed a method for directly measuring the performance of stemmers using grouped lists of words applied to the stemmer, counting the number of overstemming and understemming errors, then comparing the results with what would have been obtained by using a set of truncation stemmers. The final measure being the Error Rate Relative to Truncation (ERRT). Paice, C.D. (1996) Method for Evaluation of Stemming Algorithms based on Error Counting, JASIS, 47(8): 632-649Personal life
Christopher D Paice was born in 1941, he married Kathleen F Moss in 1965 in the Manchester Registration district. In 2015 he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour, shortly after he and his wife moved away from Cumbria to Stratford, he passed away 21 April 2016.Publications
* * * * * * * * * * * * *References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Paice, Christopher D. 1941 births 2016 deaths Information retrieval researchers