Stemming

Stemming reduces words to a common root form by stripping suffixes using rule-based heuristics, without reference to the word's grammatical context. The Porter stemmer, for example, converts 'running', 'runs', and 'runner' all to 'run'. Stemming is fast and language-independent but imprecise: it can produce non-words and conflate distinct terms. It is commonly used in search indexing where recall matters more than exact morphological accuracy.