A Comparative Study of Stemming Algorithms

Stemming is a pre-processing step in Text Mining applications as well as a very common requirement of Natural Language processing functions. In fact it is very important in most of the Information Retrieval systems. The main purpose of stemming is to reduce different grammatical forms / word forms of a word like its noun, adjective, verb, adverb etc. to its root form. We can say that the goal of stemming is to reduce inflectional forms and sometimes derivationally related forms of a word to a common base form. In this paper we have discussed different methods of stemming and their comparisons in terms of usage, advantages as well as limitations. The basic difference between stemming and lemmatization is also discussed. Keywordsstemming; text mining; NLP; IR; suffix