Martin Porter

{{For|the musician|Martin Porter (musician)}}

Martin F. Porter is the inventor of the Porter Stemmer,[http://www.cs.odu.edu/~jbollen/IR04/readings/readings5.pdf Porter Stemming Algorithm] one of the most common algorithms for stemming English,[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].Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin (2009). Speech and Language Processing. Pearson, p. 102. 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).[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Martin+Porter%22 Articles] at Google Scholar, accessed 2012-02-09.

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.{{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}} Part of Dialog was then spun off to become BrightStation in 2000,{{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}}{{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}} which transitioned Open Muscat to a closed-source development model in 2001.{{cite web |url=https://xapian.org/history |title=The Xapian Project: History|access-date=2022-04-10}} Subsequently, a group of developers led by Porter{{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}} initiated a project based on Open Muscat called Xapian and released the first official version on September 30, 2002.{{cite web |url=https://xapian.org/docs/xapian-core-1.4.19/NEWS |title=Xapian Core NEWS |access-date=2022-04-10}}

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

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).

Museum, Vol XXX, n° 3/4, 1978, Museums and Computers p.224

Martin Porter is co-founder with John Snyder of the contextual targeting and content recommendation company, Grapeshot.[http://www.grapeshot.co.uk/about.php Grapeshot] (Accessed Oct 2012) 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.[https://www.theparliamentaryreview.co.uk/organisations/grapeshot] Parliamentary Review 2018 - Grapeshot

On May 15, 2018, Oracle Corporation completed the acquisition of Grapeshot.