Refining Textual Meaning through Stemming

Stemming in NLP is the process of reducing words to their base or root form. For example, the stem of the words running, runners, and run is run. Stemming is commonly used in NLP to simplify text analysis by treating different forms of a word as a single term. This helps to reduce the number of unique words that need to be analyzed, which can improve the performance of algorithms that rely on text data.

Using stemming in practice

Let’s explore a practical example of implementing stemming with the tm package.