Martin Porter

Martin F. Porter is the inventor of the Porter Stemmer,[1] one of the most common algorithms for stemming English,[2][3] and the Snowball programming framework. His 1980 paper "An algorithm for suffix stripping", proposing the stemming algorithm, has been cited over 8000 times (Google Scholar).[4]

The Muscat search engine comes from research performed by Porter at the University of Cambridge and was commercialized in 1984 by Cambridge CD Publishing; it was subsequently sold to MAID which became the Dialog Corporation.[5] Part of Dialog was then spun off to become BrightStation in 2000,[6][7] which transitioned Open Muscat to a closed-source development model in 2001.[8] Subsequently, a group of developers led by Porter[9] initiated a project based on Open Muscat called Xapian and released the first official version on September 30, 2002.[10]

In 2000 he was awarded the Tony Kent Strix award.[11]

Porter read mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge (1963–66) and went to get a Diploma in Computer Science (1967) and a PhD. at Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He worked at the University of Leeds for a year before returning to Cambridge's Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (1971-1974) and at the Sedgwick Museum as a programmer (1974-1976). In 1977, he became the Director of the Museum Documentation Advisory Unit (MDA).[12]

Martin Porter is co-founder with John Snyder of the contextual targeting and content recommendation company, Grapeshot.[13] 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.[14] On May 15, 2018, Oracle Corporation completed the acquisition of Grapeshot.