What Is Stemming?
Linguistically, words follow morphological rules that allow a speaker to derive variants of a same idea to evoke an action (verb), an object or concept (noun) or the property of something (adjective). For instance, the following words are derived from the same stem and share an abstract meaning of action and movement: activate activating active activenesses activated activation actively actives activates activations activeness etc. Stemming does the reverse process: it deduces the stem from a fully suffixed word according to its morphological rules. These rules concern morphological and inflectional suffixes. The former type usually changes the lexical category of words whereas the latter indicates plural and gender (in gender oriented languages such as French, Spanish and German): Morphological suffix : activate (verb) activation (noun) Inflextional suffix : activation (noun) activations (plural noun) Since words that derived from a single root usually share a common meaning, stemming
