Natural Language Processing: Python and NLTK

Understanding stemmer

Stemming may be defined as the process of obtaining a stem from a word by eliminating the affixes from a word. For example, in the case of the word raining, stemmer would return the root word or stem word rain by removing the affix from raining. In order to increase the accuracy of information retrieval, search engines mostly use stemming to get the stems and store them as indexed words. Search engines call words with the same meaning synonyms, which may be a kind of query expansion known as conflation. Martin Porter has designed a well-known stemming algorithm known as the Porter stemming algorithm. This algorithm is basically designed to replace and eliminate some well-known suffices present in English words. To perform ...