I think you might benefit from stemming
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/stemming/general/index.htm
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=175245
Comment on Re: NLP - natural language regex-collections?
Stemming certainly must be fitted in at some point. It would be part of above-mentioned streamlining while gathering regexes from real-life, published sentences.
Thanks for those links. I still have to study on several fronts, I'm afraid...