Lemmatization

ˌlɛm.ə.təˈzeɪ.ʃən

Lemmatization is a natural language processing technique that reduces words to their base or root form, known as a lemma. Unlike stemming, which may truncate words to their root forms, lemmatization considers the context and converts the word into its meaningful base form. For example, the words 'running' and 'ran' are lemmatized to 'run'. This process is essential in various applications such as text analysis, information retrieval, and machine translation, where understanding the underlying meaning of words is crucial. By using lemmatization, systems can improve their accuracy in understanding and processing human language.