Snowball French stemming

Good Day,

 

I am using OpenFTS 0.35 with the Snowball French stemming algorithm and the Snowball wrapper downloaded from the snowball.tartarus.org site. With this algorithm, I came across the following inconsistency :

 

The word "française" stemmed to become "français". This is fine. However, when I stemmed the word "français", it became "franc".

 

I looked at the example list of French vocabulary and its stemmed equivalent posted on the Snowball site under the French link, and "français" is indeed stemmed to become "franc".

 

But here is the problem : I am using this stemming algorithm in conjuction with the text search package OpenFTS 0.35. When I use the French stemming algorithm to convert a piece of text containing the word "française" into its indexing equivalent, and later, search the table for the word "français", I would expect this text to be considered as a match as well. But obviously, it is not the case (and I have tried it) since, "français" will be stemmed (using the same stemming algorithm) to "franc" before the search starts, and will never match the stem "français" stored in the tsvector field.

 

Is this something one has to live with using this French stemming algorithm ? If not, is there any way to work around the problem I mentioned here ?

 

Thanks.

 

 

Fred