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Accents and diacritics.

Diacritics on characters in English have a fairly marginal status, and we might well want cliché and cliche to match, or naive and naïve. This can be done by normalizing tokens to remove diacritics. In many other languages, diacritics are a regular part of the writing system and distinguish different sounds. Occasionally words are distinguished only by their accents. For instance, in Spanish, peña is `a cliff', while pena is `sorrow'. Nevertheless, the important question is usually not prescriptive or linguistic but is a question of how users are likely to write queries for these words. In many cases, users will enter queries for words without diacritics, whether for reasons of speed, laziness, limited software, or habits born of the days when it was hard to use non-ASCII text on many computer systems. In these cases, it might be best to equate all words to a form without diacritics.



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2009-04-07