Stemming Algorithm

Stemming Algorithm

In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process for reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root. Algorithms for stemming have been studied in computer science since 1968. Many search engines treat words with the same stem as synonyms as a kind of query broadening, a process called conflation.

Stemming programs are commonly referred to as stemming algorithms or stemmers.