The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film is one of the Academy Awards handed out annually by the U. S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It is given to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States with a predominantly non-English dialogue track; when the first Academy Awards ceremony was held on May 16, 1929, to honor films released in 1927/28, there was no separate category for foreign language films. Between 1947 and 1955, the Academy presented Special/Honorary Awards to the best foreign language films released in the United States; these awards, were not handed out on a regular basis, were not competitive since there were no nominees but one winning film per year. For the 1956 Academy Awards, a competitive Academy Award of Merit, known as the Best Foreign Language Film Award, was created for non-English speaking films, has been given annually since then. Unlike other Academy Awards, the International Feature Film award is not presented to a specific individual, but is considered an award for the submitting country as a whole.

Over the years, the Best International Feature Film Award and its predecessors have been given predominantly to European films: out of the seventy-two awards handed out by the Academy since 1947 to foreign language films, fifty-seven have gone to European films, seven to Asian films, five to films from the Americas and three to African films. Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini directed four Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award–winning motion pictures during his lifetime, a record that remains unmatched as of 2015; the most awarded foreign country is Italy, with 14 awards won and 28 nominations, while France is the foreign country with the largest number of nominations. Israel is the foreign country with the largest number of nominations without winning an award, while Portugal has the largest number of submissions without a nomination. In 2020, South Korea's entrant Parasite became the first International Feature Film winner, first non-English film overall, to win Best Picture; when the first Academy Awards ceremony was held in 1929, no foreign-language film was honored.

During the early post-war era, eight foreign language films received Honorary Awards. Academy leader and board member Jean Hersholt argued that "an international award, if properly and administered, would promote a closer relationship between American film craftsmen and those of other countries"; the first foreign language film honored with such an award was the Italian neorealist drama Shoeshine, whose citation read: "the high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity". In the following years, similar awards were given to seven other films: one from Italy, two from France, three from Japan, as well as a Franco-Italian co-production; these awards, were handed out on a discretionary rather than a regular basis, were not competitive since there were no nominees but one winning film per year. A separate category for non-English-language films was created in 1956. Known as the Best Foreign Language Film Award, it has been awarded every year since then.

The first recipient was the Italian neorealist drama La Strada, which helped establish Federico Fellini as one of the most important European directors. During the Academy's board of governors meeting on April 23, 2019, it was decided that the category would be renamed Best International Feature Film beginning at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020, it was argued that use of the term "Foreign" was "outdated within the global filmmaking community", that the new name "better represents this category, promotes a positive and inclusive view of filmmaking, the art of film as a universal experience". Animated and documentary films will be permitted in this category; the existing eligibility criteria remain. Unlike other Academy Awards, the International Feature Film Award does not require films to be released in the United States in order to be eligible for competition. Films competing in the category must have been first released in the country submitting them during the eligibility period defined by the rules of the Academy, must have been exhibited for at least seven consecutive days in a commercial movie theater.

The eligibility period for the category differs from that required for most other categories: the awards year defined for the International Feature Film category begins and ends before the ordinary awards year, which corresponds to an exact calendar year. For the 80th Academy Awards, for instance, the release deadline was set on September 30, 2007, whereas the qualifying run for most other categories extended until December 31, 2007. Although the award is referred to as the Foreign Film Oscar in newspaper articles and on the Internet, such a designation is misleading, since a film's nationality matters much less than its language. Although a film has to be non-American in order to be nominated for the award, it has to be in a language other than English. Foreign films where the majority of the dialogue is in English cannot qualify for the International Feature Film Award, the Academy has ap

In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing inflected words to their word stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word. Algorithms for stemming have been studied in computer science since the 1960s. Many search engines treat words with the same stem as synonyms as a kind of query expansion, a process called conflation. A computer program or subroutine that stems word may be called a stemming program, stemming algorithm, or stemmer. A stemmer for English operating on the stem cat should identify such strings as cats and catty. A stemming algorithm might reduce the words fishing and fisher to the stem fish; the stem need not be a word, for example the Porter algorithm reduces, argued, argues and argus to the stem argu. The first published stemmer was written by Julie Beth Lovins in 1968; this paper was remarkable for its early date and had great influence on work in this area.

Her paper refers to three earlier major attempts at stemming algorithms, by Professor John W. Tukey of Princeton University, the algorithm developed at Harvard University by Michael Lesk, under the direction of Professor Gerard Salton, a third algorithm developed by James L. Dolby of R and D Consultants, Los Altos, California. A stemmer was written by Martin Porter and was published in the July 1980 issue of the journal Program; this stemmer was widely used and became the de facto standard algorithm used for English stemming. Dr. Porter received the Tony Kent Strix award in 2000 for his work on stemming and information retrieval. Many implementations of the Porter stemming algorithm were written and distributed; as a result, these stemmers did not match their potential. To eliminate this source of error, Martin Porter released an official free software implementation of the algorithm around the year 2000, he extended this work over the next few years by building Snowball, a framework for writing stemming algorithms, implemented an improved English stemmer together with stemmers for several other languages.

The Paice-Husk Stemmer was developed by Chris D Paice at Lancaster University in the late 1980s, it is an iterative stemmer and features an externally stored set of stemming rules. The standard set of rules provides a'strong' stemmer and may specify the removal or replacement of an ending; the replacement technique avoids the need for a separate stage in the process to recode or provide partial matching. Paice developed a direct measurement for comparing stemmers based on counting the over-stemming and under-stemming errors. There are several types of stemming algorithms which differ in respect to performance and accuracy and how certain stemming obstacles are overcome. A simple stemmer looks up the inflected form in a lookup table; the advantages of this approach are that it is simple and handles exceptions. The disadvantages are that all inflected forms must be explicitly listed in the table: new or unfamiliar words are not handled if they are regular, the table may be large. For languages with simple morphology, like English, table sizes are modest, but inflected languages like Turkish may have hundreds of potential inflected forms for each root.

A lookup approach may use preliminary part-of-speech tagging to avoid overstemming. The lookup table used by a stemmer is produced semi-automatically. For example, if the word is "run" the inverted algorithm might automatically generate the forms "running", "runs", "runned", "runly"; the last two forms are valid constructions, but they are unlikely.. Suffix stripping algorithms do not rely on a lookup table that consists of inflected forms and root form relations. Instead, a smaller list of "rules" is stored which provides a path for the algorithm, given an input word form, to find its root form; some examples of the rules include: if the word ends in'ed', remove the'ed' if the word ends in'ing', remove the'ing' if the word ends in'ly', remove the'ly'Suffix stripping approaches enjoy the benefit of being much simpler to maintain than brute force algorithms, assuming the maintainer is sufficiently knowledgeable in the challenges of linguistics and morphology and encoding suffix stripping rules.

Suffix stripping algorithms are sometimes regarded as crude given the poor performance when dealing with exceptional relations. The solutions produced by suffix stripping algorithms are limited to those lexical categories which have well known suffixes with few exceptions. This, however, is a problem. Lemmatisation attempts to improve upon this challenge. Prefix stripping may be implemented. Of course, not all languages use suffixing. Suffix stripping algorithms may differ in results for a variety of reasons. One such reason is whether the algorithm constrains whether the output word must be a real word in the given language; some approaches do not require the word to exist in the language lexicon. Alternatively, some suffix stripping approaches maintain a database of all known morphological word roots that exist as real words; these approaches check the list for the existence of the term prior to making a decision. If the term does not exist, alternate action is taken; this alternate action may involve several other criteria.

The non-existence of an output term may serve to cause the algor

The 5th Battalion, 52nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment is an air defense artillery battalion in the United States Army based at Fort Bliss, Texas. Known as "five-five-deuce," the battalion motto is "Always Prepared" The former motto was "We Build Warriors"; the battalion is part of 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade and the 32nd Army Air & Missile Defense Command. The battalion consists of a headquarters and headquarters battery, four Patriot missile batteries and a maintenance company; each battery has six Patriot missile launchers in accordance with the Patriot PAC-3 configuration. The battalion was split into three separate groups during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Batteries A, B, E, along with the 507th Maintenance Company and HHB, 5-52d ADA, were assigned to 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade, under Colonel Heidi Brown, the first female Patriot brigade commander, to provide air defense coverage for Coalition forces entering Iraq. Alpha, Echo, HHB batteries were provided security by the Companies A and C of the 3d Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment from Kuwait to Baghdad.

Batteries C and D were assigned to 32d AAMDC to provide air defense coverage for Kuwait. Battery D, 5-52d ADA shot down the first Scud launched by Iraqi forces during the opening days of the invasion. Battery C, 5-52d ADA ended the war with the highest number of intercepted missiles totaling 3, battery C shot down a British Tornado aircraft. During the invasion, Battery E was bombed by friendly aircraft outside of FARP shell, which created a 30-by-30-foot hole and damaged the radar system. A few days Battery E fired two PAC-3 missiles and shot down U. S. Navy F-18 pilot Nathan White outside of the Karbala, he was found dead in one of the few lakes in Iraq. This friendly fire incident sidelined Battery E, allowing Batteries A and B, 5-52d ADA to be the first Patriot batteries in Baghdad, with Battery B preceding Battery A by a few hours; the 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed during the rapid advance towards Baghdad. The unit made a wrong turn into Nasiriyah, northwest of Basra; the mistake was due to lack of rest, limited communications and human error according to a U.

S. Army investigation. Several soldiers were killed and six were held as prisoners of war. Prior to invasion, 5-52d ADA had never conducted a bounding movement exercise to the extent Operation Iraqi Freedom required. In the summer of 2005, the 507th was inactivated and reflagged as Company E, 5-52d ADA, reflagged again as Company F when the battalion received an Avenger battery that became Battery E, 5-52d ADA, during an Army-wide reorganization of Patriot battalions. Organized 6 July 1916 in the Regular Army at Fort Washington, Maryland, as the 1st Company, Fort Washington Reorganized and redesignated 6 July 1917 as Battery I, 8th Provisional Regiment, Coast Artillery Corps Reorganized and redesignated 5 February 1918 as Battery I, 53d Artillery Redesignated 15 July 1918 as Battery E, 52d Artillery Inactivated 16 May 1921 at Fort Eustis, Virginia Activated 18 August 1921 at Fort Eustis, Virginia Redesignated 1 July 1924 as Battery E, 52nd Coast Artillery Reorganized and redesignated 1 May 1943 as Battery A, 285th Coast Artillery Battalion Inactivated 5 May 1944 at Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky Disbanded 14 June 1944 Reconstituted 28 June 1950 in the Regular Army, consolidated with Battery A, 52d Field Artillery Battalion, consolidated unit designated as Battery A, 52d Field Artillery Battalion, an element of the 24th Infantry Division Inactivated 5 June 1958 and relieved from assignment to the 24th Infantry Division Withdrawn 18 May 1959 from the Regular Army and allotted to the Army Reserve.