On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 15:09:53 -0600, "Luc The Perverse"
<sll_noSpamlicious_z_XXX_m@cc.usu.edu> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :

There was one featured on Star Trek NG episode 47.

You ask for a language parser (going for the syntax of sentences), but
what you describe is  aiming at the moprhology of words. Now it depends
on what you want. Do you really want the linguistic base form, as you
find it in human readable dictionaries? Then a lemmatizer can give you
the base form of a word, as well as telling you which form of the word
you have at hand. There should definetly be something in Java, as it is
a very common problem, implementations in different programming
languages are available for decades. Of course the lemmatizer might not
give you a unique information about a word, as for instance "run" could
be a verb as well as noun. A so called tagger could help you then,
reducing this ambiguity, based on the context of the word. It is also a
standard problem and a lot of implementations are around. A tagger might
still not give you a unique answer, but for most practical applications,
this might not be a problem.

If you just want to do some search, dictionary lookup etc., a stemmer
might be, what you are looking for. It reduces words not to the
linguistic base form, but to a stem, which is not necessarly actually an
english word. This would be the simplest solution, used for instance in
search engines. This has also been implemented by genererations of
computer linguists, so you might search for "stemmer Java" in Google and
find something you could use.

Greetings,
Ralf