Which Is Better Lemmatization vs Stemming?

The real difference between stemming and lemmatization is threefold: Stemming reduces word-forms to (pseudo)stems, whereas lemmatization reduces the word-forms to linguistically valid lemmas.

Is lemmatization or stemming better?

Stemming and Lemmatization both generate the foundation sort of the inflected words and therefore the only difference is that stem may not be an actual word whereas, lemma is an actual language word. Stemming follows an algorithm with steps to perform on the words which makes it faster.

Should I use both stemming and lemmatization?

Short answer- go with stemming when the vocab space is small and the documents are large. Conversely, go with word embeddings when the vocab space is large but the documents are small. However, don't use lemmatization as the increased performance to increased cost ratio is quite low.

James H. Sterling

James H. Sterling

Environmental Science & Climate Journalist

James Sterling reports on renewable energy developments, climate policy, ecological conservation, and green tech innovations around the globe.