juniorNLP
What is stemming in NLP?
Updated May 17, 2026
Short answer
Stemming reduces words to their root form by chopping suffixes.
Deep explanation
Stemming is a heuristic process that removes affixes from words to obtain a root form, often not a valid word. Algorithms like Porter Stemmer apply rule-based transformations.
Real-world example
Search engines use stemming to match 'run', 'running', and 'runs'.
Common mistakes
- Confusing stemming with lemmatization
- expecting grammatically correct outputs.
Follow-up questions
- What is Porter Stemmer?
- Why is stemming useful in search engines?