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Portuguese Stemmer Benchmarks

This page reports same-language stemming benchmarks for Portuguese. Accuracy is listed first because speed without root agreement is not enough to interpret stemmer quality.

All speed values are environment-specific and were measured on the hardware and JVM listed in the benchmark overview. Speed benchmark operations process changed dictionary tokens only. Accuracy uses the complete Radixor dictionary for the language.

Radixor must not be read as simply "slower" when a narrow competitor has a lower timing row. In these tables Radixor is the quality-oriented baseline: its exact-root accuracy is typically close to 100%, while many faster rule-based, light, minimal, or possessive filters reach that speed by doing much less linguistic work and often score far lower in All exact and Changed exact. The Radixor rows in this benchmark refresh use the contracted compiled patch trie: compilation collapses uniform patch-command subtrees into accepting leaves, reducing hot lookup depth while preserving the preferred stemming result measured by the accuracy pass. The EnglishRadixorDictionaryCoverageBenchmark table shows the resulting quality/speed envelope explicitly. The same interpretation applies to this language page: speed rows must be read together with the accuracy table above them.

Dictionary Corpus

Model ID Model version Language Dictionary rows Complete quality tokens Already-root tokens Changed tokens JMH timing tokens
pt-pt-default 1.0.0 PT_PT 4,001 215,490 8,002 207,488 207,488

Radixor Patch Command Distribution

Radixor stores the preferred transformation for each normalized dictionary word form as a compiled patch command. This distribution shows which runtime command class is selected by the trained trie for the complete default-model dictionary. The total number of preferred patch commands analyzed for this language is 215,490.

Command class Meaning Word forms Share
AppendCharacterCommand Appends one character to the end of the word form. 3,806 1.766%
BackwardCompoundCommand Applies a multi-step backward patch made from skip, delete, insert, and replace operations. 120,535 55.935%
DeleteSuffixCommand Deletes one or more trailing characters from the word form. 71,284 33.080%
PreserveCommand Returns the word form unchanged because it already matches the preferred root. 8,003 3.714%
ReplaceLastCharacterCommand Replaces the final character of the word form. 11,862 5.505%

Accuracy

Accuracy is computed from JMH auxiliary counters in the current report. The counters are deterministic for a fixed corpus and stemmer; percentages divide matching counters by evaluated counters from the same report and are not timing metrics.

Stemmer All exact Changed exact Root preserved Note
Radixor 99.815% 99.808% 100.000% Radixor dictionary-trained patch-command stemmer.
Lucene PortugueseLightStemFilter 8.966% 5.558% 97.326% Light suffix stemmer; intentionally narrower than Radixor's dictionary-trained transformation model.
Lucene PortugueseMinimalStemFilter 5.539% 1.896% 100.000% Minimal suffix reducer; narrow baseline, not a full stemmer.
Lucene SnowballFilter 0.625% 0.558% 2.374% Lucene TokenFilter integration path around the Snowball algorithm.
Official Snowball direct 0.625% 0.558% 2.374% Official Snowball generated Java stemmer; rule-based suffix algorithm.
Lucene PortugueseStemFilter 0.312% 0.308% 0.425% Portuguese RSLP-style Lucene TokenFilter stemmer.

Speed

Speed uses JMH average time, 5 warmup iterations, 10 measurement iterations, 3 independent forks, and 1 thread. Relative factor is computed against the single Radixor row on this language page. Values below 1.000 are faster than that Radixor baseline; values above 1.000 are slower.

Stemmer Benchmark method Score ms/op Error ms ns/token Relative vs Radixor Note
Radixor portugueseRadixor 10.902 0.166 52.5 1.000 Radixor dictionary-trained patch-command stemmer.
Lucene PortugueseLightStemFilter portugueseLucenePortugueseLightStemFilter 10.125 0.161 48.8 0.929 Light Portuguese suffix stemmer.
Lucene PortugueseMinimalStemFilter portugueseLucenePortugueseMinimalStemFilter 14.338 0.156 69.1 1.315 Minimal Portuguese suffix reducer.
Official Snowball direct snowballDirect[PORTUGUESE] 52.193 1.905 251.5 4.788 Official Snowball generated Java stemmer; direct API.
Lucene SnowballFilter luceneSnowballFilter[PORTUGUESE] 58.991 2.457 284.3 5.411 Lucene TokenFilter path around Snowball; includes TokenStream overhead.
Lucene PortugueseStemFilter portugueseLucenePortugueseStemFilter 164.457 8.688 792.6 15.085 Portuguese RSLP-style Lucene TokenFilter.

Interpretation Notes

  • Radixor is a dictionary-trained patch-command stemmer. Its learned transformations can generalize beyond the word forms listed in the training resource.
  • Light, minimal, plural, and possessive filters are narrow baselines. They can be fast because they intentionally perform less linguistic work.
  • Lucene TokenFilter rows include TokenStream, attribute, and required normalization overhead. Direct rows measure exposed direct APIs.
  • Morfologik rows are dictionary-based and can emit multiple terms for one input token. Quality rows use the first returned term when no ranking weight is available.
  • Snowball rows are rule-based generated suffix stemmers; they are useful algorithmic baselines, not dictionary-root equivalence guarantees.

Stemming Quality

Runtime performance and linguistic grouping quality are independent dimensions. This section evaluates language PT_PT using the complete validated stemming-quality result matrix. Every distinct surface form is one evaluated item and can belong to several dictionary groups. Two forms are a positive pair when their group-membership sets intersect and a negative pair when those sets are disjoint. A pair shared through several groups is counted once. Exact equality with a predetermined lemma is not required.

ALL_WORDS includes every valid group and its original forms. LOWERCASE_GROUPS_ONLY excludes an entire group when any Unicode code point is uppercase or titlecase; retained words are not lowercased or otherwise rewritten. This isolates case-handling effects without changing retained inputs. Download the complete machine-readable result snapshot.

Evaluation Scope and Key Findings

The default model is pt-pt-default, loaded from classpath resource org/egothor/stemmer/models/pt-pt-default/stemmer.gz. The following findings compare only deterministic PRIMARY_OUTPUT rows over identical included groups; candidate policies are reported separately as capability analyses.

  • ALL_WORDS: Radixor ranks first by balanced accuracy at 0.998542 among 6 deterministic stemmers. The runner-up is SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT at 0.938922, a difference of 0.059620. This rank does not imply leadership in throughput or every secondary metric.
  • LOWERCASE_GROUPS_ONLY: Radixor ranks first by balanced accuracy at 0.998542 among 6 deterministic stemmers. The runner-up is SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT at 0.938922, a difference of 0.059620. This rank does not imply leadership in throughput or every secondary metric.

ALL_WORDS

This mode contains 8 result rows, 6 evaluated stemmers, and 3 output policies. Applied-row and form counts are shown per row because adapters share the language corpus but policy rows remain independently auditable. PRIMARY_OUTPUT and ALL_CANDIDATES rankings are ordered by unrounded balanced accuracy, followed by MCC, F1, over-stemming rate, over-stemming count, under-stemming rate, and stemmer. ANY_CANDIDATE has no single rank metric and is listed alphabetically. Balanced accuracy is a navigation metric, not a universally authoritative quality score.

PRIMARY_OUTPUT ranking

Rank Stemmer Balanced accuracy Over-stemming (OI) Under-stemming (UI)
1 Radixor 0.998542 0.000000% 0.291615%
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT 0.938922 0.000656% 12.214929%
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER 0.938922 0.000656% 12.214929%
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER 0.846554 0.000364% 30.688771%
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER 0.513632 0.000006% 97.273598%
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER 0.503949 <0.000001% 99.210240%
Classification metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy Precision Recall Specificity Balanced accuracy Pairwise accuracy Error rate
1 Radixor PRIMARY_OUTPUT 1.000000 0.997084 1.000000 0.998542 0.999999 0.000001
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.970538 0.877851 0.999993 0.938922 0.999963 0.000037
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.970538 0.877851 0.999993 0.938922 0.999963 0.000037
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.979145 0.693112 0.999996 0.846554 0.999921 0.000079
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.991719 0.027264 1.000000 0.513632 0.999760 0.000240
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.999608 0.007898 1.000000 0.503949 0.999756 0.000244
Pair-relation metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy F0.5 F1 F2 Jaccard Fowlkes–Mallows MCC
1 Radixor PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.999415 0.998540 0.997666 0.997084 0.998541 0.998541
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.950467 0.921871 0.894944 0.855065 0.923032 0.923014
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.950467 0.921871 0.894944 0.855065 0.923032 0.923014
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.904492 0.811666 0.736120 0.683029 0.823807 0.823773
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.122815 0.053069 0.033847 0.027258 0.164433 0.164413
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.038278 0.015671 0.009853 0.007898 0.088851 0.088840
Raw pair counts
Rank Stemmer Output policy TP FP FN TN Over error / possible Under error / possible
1 Radixor PRIMARY_OUTPUT 5470353 0 15999 22274113243 0 / 22274113243 15999 / 5486352
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT PRIMARY_OUTPUT 4816198 146201 670154 22273967042 146201 / 22274113243 670154 / 5486352
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 4816198 146201 670154 22273967042 146201 / 22274113243 670154 / 5486352
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 3802658 80995 1683694 22274032248 80995 / 22274113243 1683694 / 5486352
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 149580 1249 5336772 22274111994 1249 / 22274113243 5336772 / 5486352
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 43329 17 5443023 22274113226 17 / 22274113243 5443023 / 5486352

ANY_CANDIDATE oracle bounds

These results are measured, not missing. ANY_CANDIDATE answers two separate optimistic questions for each pair: a gold-related pair avoids under-stemming when the candidate sets intersect, while a gold-negative pair avoids over-stemming when some non-colliding candidate selection exists. The oracle may choose a different candidate for the same word in different pairs. Consequently, these decisions do not form one globally realizable predicted relation or one TP/FP/FN/TN confusion matrix. Balanced accuracy, F-scores, Jaccard, Fowlkes–Mallows, and MCC are therefore mathematically not applicable, rather than unknown.

Stemmer Optimistic over-stemming (OI) Optimistic under-stemming (UI)
Radixor 0.000000% 0.000000%
Oracle-bound pair counts
Stemmer Unavoidable over errors / gold-negative pairs Unrepairable under errors / gold-related pairs
Radixor 0 / 22274113243 0 / 5486352

ALL_CANDIDATES ranking

Rank Stemmer Balanced accuracy Over-stemming (OI) Under-stemming (UI)
1 Radixor 1.000000 0.000000% 0.000000%
Classification metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy Precision Recall Specificity Balanced accuracy Pairwise accuracy Error rate
1 Radixor ALL_CANDIDATES 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 0.000000
Pair-relation metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy F0.5 F1 F2 Jaccard Fowlkes–Mallows MCC
1 Radixor ALL_CANDIDATES 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
Raw pair counts
Rank Stemmer Output policy TP FP FN TN Over error / possible Under error / possible
1 Radixor ALL_CANDIDATES 5486352 0 0 22274113243 0 / 22274113243 0 / 5486352

Multi-output analysis

Alternative candidates are capability analyses, not replacements for the deterministic comparison.

Stemmer Under pairs repaired Best-case over pairs avoided All-candidate collisions added Multi-candidate forms Multi-candidate share Maximum candidates Total candidate assignments
Radixor 15999 0 0 392 0.185702% 3 211489

LOWERCASE_GROUPS_ONLY

This mode contains 8 result rows, 6 evaluated stemmers, and 3 output policies. Applied-row and form counts are shown per row because adapters share the language corpus but policy rows remain independently auditable. PRIMARY_OUTPUT and ALL_CANDIDATES rankings are ordered by unrounded balanced accuracy, followed by MCC, F1, over-stemming rate, over-stemming count, under-stemming rate, and stemmer. ANY_CANDIDATE has no single rank metric and is listed alphabetically. Balanced accuracy is a navigation metric, not a universally authoritative quality score.

PRIMARY_OUTPUT ranking

Rank Stemmer Balanced accuracy Over-stemming (OI) Under-stemming (UI)
1 Radixor 0.998542 0.000000% 0.291615%
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT 0.938922 0.000656% 12.214929%
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER 0.938922 0.000656% 12.214929%
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER 0.846554 0.000364% 30.688771%
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER 0.513632 0.000006% 97.273598%
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER 0.503949 <0.000001% 99.210240%
Classification metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy Precision Recall Specificity Balanced accuracy Pairwise accuracy Error rate
1 Radixor PRIMARY_OUTPUT 1.000000 0.997084 1.000000 0.998542 0.999999 0.000001
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.970538 0.877851 0.999993 0.938922 0.999963 0.000037
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.970538 0.877851 0.999993 0.938922 0.999963 0.000037
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.979145 0.693112 0.999996 0.846554 0.999921 0.000079
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.991719 0.027264 1.000000 0.513632 0.999760 0.000240
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.999608 0.007898 1.000000 0.503949 0.999756 0.000244
Pair-relation metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy F0.5 F1 F2 Jaccard Fowlkes–Mallows MCC
1 Radixor PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.999415 0.998540 0.997666 0.997084 0.998541 0.998541
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.950467 0.921871 0.894944 0.855065 0.923032 0.923014
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.950467 0.921871 0.894944 0.855065 0.923032 0.923014
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.904492 0.811666 0.736120 0.683029 0.823807 0.823773
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.122815 0.053069 0.033847 0.027258 0.164433 0.164413
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 0.038278 0.015671 0.009853 0.007898 0.088851 0.088840
Raw pair counts
Rank Stemmer Output policy TP FP FN TN Over error / possible Under error / possible
1 Radixor PRIMARY_OUTPUT 5470353 0 15999 22274113243 0 / 22274113243 15999 / 5486352
2 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE DIRECT PRIMARY_OUTPUT 4816198 146201 670154 22273967042 146201 / 22274113243 670154 / 5486352
3 SNOWBALL PORTUGUESE LUCENE FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 4816198 146201 670154 22273967042 146201 / 22274113243 670154 / 5486352
4 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 3802658 80995 1683694 22274032248 80995 / 22274113243 1683694 / 5486352
5 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE LIGHT STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 149580 1249 5336772 22274111994 1249 / 22274113243 5336772 / 5486352
6 PORTUGUESE LUCENE PORTUGUESE MINIMAL STEM FILTER PRIMARY_OUTPUT 43329 17 5443023 22274113226 17 / 22274113243 5443023 / 5486352

ANY_CANDIDATE oracle bounds

These results are measured, not missing. ANY_CANDIDATE answers two separate optimistic questions for each pair: a gold-related pair avoids under-stemming when the candidate sets intersect, while a gold-negative pair avoids over-stemming when some non-colliding candidate selection exists. The oracle may choose a different candidate for the same word in different pairs. Consequently, these decisions do not form one globally realizable predicted relation or one TP/FP/FN/TN confusion matrix. Balanced accuracy, F-scores, Jaccard, Fowlkes–Mallows, and MCC are therefore mathematically not applicable, rather than unknown.

Stemmer Optimistic over-stemming (OI) Optimistic under-stemming (UI)
Radixor 0.000000% 0.000000%
Oracle-bound pair counts
Stemmer Unavoidable over errors / gold-negative pairs Unrepairable under errors / gold-related pairs
Radixor 0 / 22274113243 0 / 5486352

ALL_CANDIDATES ranking

Rank Stemmer Balanced accuracy Over-stemming (OI) Under-stemming (UI)
1 Radixor 1.000000 0.000000% 0.000000%
Classification metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy Precision Recall Specificity Balanced accuracy Pairwise accuracy Error rate
1 Radixor ALL_CANDIDATES 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 0.000000
Pair-relation metrics
Rank Stemmer Output policy F0.5 F1 F2 Jaccard Fowlkes–Mallows MCC
1 Radixor ALL_CANDIDATES 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000 1.000000
Raw pair counts
Rank Stemmer Output policy TP FP FN TN Over error / possible Under error / possible
1 Radixor ALL_CANDIDATES 5486352 0 0 22274113243 0 / 22274113243 0 / 5486352

Multi-output analysis

Alternative candidates are capability analyses, not replacements for the deterministic comparison.

Stemmer Under pairs repaired Best-case over pairs avoided All-candidate collisions added Multi-candidate forms Multi-candidate share Maximum candidates Total candidate assignments
Radixor 15999 0 0 392 0.185702% 3 211489

Output Policies and Metric Definitions

Each distinct surface form is one item and may belong to several gold groups. Two forms are gold-related when their membership sets intersect; a relation shared by several groups is counted once. PRIMARY_OUTPUT uses one deterministic stem per form. ANY_CANDIDATE is an optimistic oracle-assisted pairwise upper bound: a gold-related pair succeeds when candidates intersect, while a gold-negative pair succeeds when a non-colliding selection exists. Candidate choices may differ between pairs, so this is not deterministic runtime behaviour and does not define one confusion matrix. ALL_CANDIDATES activates every returned candidate; forms are related when candidate sets intersect.

For PRIMARY_OUTPUT and ALL_CANDIDATES, TP = underPossiblePairs - underErrorPairs, FN = underErrorPairs, FP = overErrorPairs, and TN = overPossiblePairs - overErrorPairs. ANY_CANDIDATE publishes only its separate oracle-assisted under/over bounds; confusion-derived metrics are mathematically inapplicable and are not presented in its language-page section. Their machine-readable CSV fields remain empty. Undefined metric denominators in otherwise applicable policies are rendered as n/a.

  • Under-stemming rate (Paice UI): FN / (TP + FN), the false-negative rate over gold-related pairs.
  • Over-stemming rate (Paice OI): FP / (TN + FP), the false-positive rate over gold-negative pairs.
  • Pairwise precision: TP / (TP + FP), the fraction of predicted conflations that are gold-standard positive pairs.
  • Pairwise recall: TP / (TP + FN), the fraction of gold-standard positive pairs successfully connected.
  • Pairwise specificity: TN / (TN + FP), the fraction of gold-negative pairs correctly separated.
  • Balanced accuracy: (recall + specificity) / 2. It gives equal weight to positive and negative pair classes and is less dominated by the large true-negative class than ordinary accuracy. It does not replace the raw errors or other metrics.
  • Pairwise F-beta: ((1 + betaSquared) * TP) / (((1 + betaSquared) * TP) + (betaSquared * FN) + FP). F0.5 emphasizes precision and penalizes over-stemming more; F1 weights precision and recall equally; F2 emphasizes recall and penalizes under-stemming more.
  • MCC: (TP * TN - FP * FN) / sqrt((TP + FP) * (TP + FN) * (TN + FP) * (TN + FN)). It uses all confusion counts and remains useful under class imbalance, except when its denominator is degenerate.
  • Jaccard index: TP / (TP + FP + FN).
  • Fowlkes–Mallows index: sqrt(precision * recall).
  • Pairwise accuracy: (TP + TN) / (TP + TN + FP + FN). It can be dominated by true-negative cross-group pairs.
  • Pairwise error rate: (FP + FN) / (TP + TN + FP + FN).

Standard ARI, homogeneity, completeness, V-measure, and NMI are not calculated: their usual contingency-table definitions require an exclusive gold partition, while this gold standard is an overlapping cover.

Provenance

  • Authoritative source: docs/benchmarks/data/stemming-quality.csv
  • Source SHA-256: d34f325da320a2e040b54d8d8b5c216d70448f08cfb8659a423e99882aa1afb5
  • Evaluation command: ./gradlew stemmingQuality --no-daemon
  • Dictionary language: PT_PT
  • Processing modes: ALL_WORDS, LOWERCASE_GROUPS_ONLY
  • Stemmer versions and transitive artifacts: resolved by the repository's JMH Gradle configuration and gradle.lockfile
  • Model ID, version, and SHA-256: recorded in every CSV row
  • Run date, core source state, JDK, operating system, and hardware: recorded on the benchmark environment page