October 2010 - Coding task

In NHS Evidence, we interface with the FAST search engine. FAST indexes content to provide relevant search results to a query. One aspect of indexing is stemming. The following task demonstrates how stemming can influence the indexing process.

Please look at the following text and acceptance criteria:

Process this text

Friends are friendlier friendlies that are friendly and classify the friendly classification class. Flowery flowers flow through following the flower flows

Acceptance criteria

frequency("following")                = 1
frequency("flow")                     = 2
frequency("classification")           = 1
frequency("class")                    = 1
frequency("flower")                   = 3
frequency("friend")                   = 4
frequency("friendly")                 = 4
frequency("classes")                  = 1

Please write code to process the text to determine the frequency of the stemmed word given in the acceptance criteria. You should expect to spend around two hours on this task.

The rules

• Don't use stemming libraries
• Use any language you are comfortable with; prefer c#, ruby or javascript
• Prove your program meets the acceptance criteria

Please fork the repository and send a pull request to submit on github or email edward.hiley-at-nice.org.uk by end of Wednesday 3rd November.