How does Snowball Stemmer work?

Question

I have been reading about Snowball Stemmer.

I wonder how does it work?

Does it use rules to stem word

or does it use machine learning to do that?

I checked snowballstem.org but could not find the answer!

Answer 1

First of all, Snowball is not a type of stemmer, but a programming language used to implement stemmers.

The reason why the Snowball language was created was to make it more convenient to implement linguistic rules. So to answer your question, they are rule-based, not ML-based.