# Martin Porter

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{{For|the musician|Martin Porter (musician)}}
'''Martin F. Porter''' is the [inventor](/source/inventor) of the Porter [Stemmer](/source/Stemming),<ref>[http://www.cs.odu.edu/~jbollen/IR04/readings/readings5.pdf Porter Stemming Algorithm]</ref> one of the most common algorithms for stemming English,<ref>[http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/stemming-and-lemmatization-1.html#2385 Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze (2008). ''Introduction to Information Retrieval''. Cambridge University Press].</ref><ref>Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin (2009). ''Speech and Language Processing''. Pearson, p. 102.</ref> and the [Snowball](/source/Snowball_programming_language) programming framework. His 1980 paper "An algorithm for suffix stripping", proposing the stemming algorithm, has been cited over 8000 times (Google Scholar).<ref>[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Martin+Porter%22 Articles] at Google Scholar, accessed 2012-02-09.</ref>

The Muscat search engine comes from research performed by Porter at the [University of Cambridge](/source/University_of_Cambridge) and was commercialized in 1984 by Cambridge CD Publishing; it was subsequently sold to MAID which became the [Dialog Corporation](/source/Dialog_(online_database)).<ref>{{cite web |author=Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Consulting |url=http://www.searchtools.com/tools/muscat.html |title=Smartlogik Discover (APR) - SearchTools Report |publisher=Searchtools.com |date= |accessdate=2012-02-09 |archive-date=2012-02-07 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120207015148/http://www.searchtools.com/tools/muscat.html |url-status=dead }}</ref> Part of Dialog was then spun off to become [BrightStation](/source/Dan_Wagner) in 2000,<ref>{{cite web|author=Rob Buckley |url=https://www.robbuckley.co.uk/galleries/infoconomist/the-bayesian-braves.php |title=The Bayesian haze |publisher=infoconomy |date=March 2001 |accessdate=2022-04-10}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|author=Paul Farrelly |url=https://www.theguardian.com/business/2000/sep/24/theobserver.observerbusiness2 |title=Bright at the end of the tunnel |work=The Guardian |date=2000-09-23 |accessdate=2022-04-10}}</ref> which transitioned Open Muscat to a closed-source development model in 2001.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://xapian.org/history |title=The Xapian Project: History|access-date=2022-04-10}}</ref> Subsequently, a group of developers led by Porter<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Tait |editor-first=John |last=Porter |first=Martin |date=March 30, 2006 |title=Charting a New Course: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.: Essays in Honour of Karen Spärck Jones |chapter=Lovins Revisited |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WjYuaoX2MwkC |location=Amsterdam: Kluwer |publisher=Springer Science & Business Media |page=61 |isbn=9781402034671}}</ref> initiated a project based on Open Muscat called [Xapian](/source/Xapian) and released the first official version on September 30, 2002.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://xapian.org/docs/xapian-core-1.4.19/NEWS |title=Xapian Core NEWS |access-date=2022-04-10}}</ref>

In 2000 he was awarded the [Tony Kent Strix award](/source/Tony_Kent_Strix_award).<ref>[http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/tony-kent-strix UKeiIG Tony Kent Strix Award] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140925204939/http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/tony-kent-strix |date=2014-09-25 }} (Accessed Feb 2012)</ref>

Porter read mathematics at [St John's College, Cambridge](/source/St_John's_College%2C_Cambridge) (1963–66) and went to get a Diploma in Computer Science (1967) and a PhD. at [Cambridge Computer Laboratory](/source/Cambridge_Computer_Laboratory). He worked at the [University of Leeds](/source/University_of_Leeds) for a year before returning to Cambridge's ''Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre'' (1971-1974) and at the [Sedgwick Museum](/source/Sedgwick_Museum) as a programmer (1974-1976). In 1977, he became the Director of the Museum Documentation Advisory Unit (MDA).<ref>
''Museum'', Vol XXX, n° 3/4, 1978, ''Museums and Computers'' p.224</ref>

Martin Porter is co-founder with John Snyder of the contextual targeting and content recommendation company, Grapeshot.<ref>[http://www.grapeshot.co.uk/about.php Grapeshot] (Accessed Oct 2012)</ref> John Snyder is listed as CEO and Martin Porter is listed as Chief Scientist. Grapeshot took £250,000 in UK government subsidies and subsequently raised £16m from UK investors.<ref>[https://www.theparliamentaryreview.co.uk/organisations/grapeshot] Parliamentary Review 2018 - Grapeshot</ref>
On May 15, 2018, [Oracle Corporation](/source/Oracle_Corporation) completed the acquisition of Grapeshot.

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
* [https://tartarus.org/~martin/ Martin Porter's personal homepage]

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Category:Living people
Category:1944 births
Category:Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
Category:Academics of the University of Leeds

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Adapted from the Wikipedia article [Martin Porter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Porter) by Wikipedia contributors ([contributor history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Porter?action=history)). Available under [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Changes may have been made.