I received a question today on stemming and multi language. Basically, “why do we need multiple fields in our Solr in different languages and how do I test multi language stemming?”.

First of all, let’s explain what stemming is. Stemming involves reducing words to their stem (or base or root) during indexing and querying in an effort to improve recall.

For example, if a document includes the following phrase “Xavier walked to work every morning from Westside Parkway” and a user searches for walk then the results will correctly include the document that has walk. Read more!