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Stoplists

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 15 Accesses

Synonyms

Negative dictionary; Stopwords

Definition

Stoplists are lists of words, commonly called stopwords, which are not indexed in an information retrieval system, and/or are not available for use as query terms. A stoplist can be created by sorting the terms in a document collection by frequency of occurrence, and designating some number of high frequency terms as stopwords, or alternately, by using one of the published lists of stopwords available. Stoplists may be generic or domain specific, and are of course language specific. When a stoplist is used for indexing, as a document is added to the system, each word in it is checked against the stoplist (for example through dictionary lookup or hashing), and those which match are eliminated from further processing. In some systems, stopwords are indexed, but the stoplist is used to eliminate the words from processing when they are used as query terms.

Key Points

Hans Peter Luhn, in pioneering work on automatic abstracting, put forward...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Dialog online courses: glossary of search terms. Available at: http://training.dialog.com/onlinecourses/glossary/glossary_life.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Library, Archival and Information Studies, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Edie Rasmussen

Authors
  1. Edie Rasmussen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Edie Rasmussen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Library, Archival & Inf. Studies, The Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Edie Rasmussen

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Rasmussen, E. (2018). Stoplists. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_955

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