what is stemming

Stemming is a natural language processing technique used to reduce words to their base form, also known as the root form. It is the process of producing morphological variants of a root/base word. Stemming is used to normalize text and make it easier to process, and it is commonly used in information retrieval and text mining applications. Stemming is performed by reducing inflected words to their word stem, base or root form, generally a written word form. Stemming is important in natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language processing (NLP) . Stemming is used to recognize, search, and retrieve more forms of words, which returns more results. Stemming is used as an approximate method for grouping words with a similar basic meaning together. There are several different algorithms for stemming, including the Porter stemmer, Snowball stemmer, and the Lancaster stemmer. However, stemming can also have some negative effects such as reducing the readability of the text, and it may not always produce the correct root form of a word.