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Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Lemmatization

The process of reducing a word to its dictionary base form while considering grammatical information.

Lemmatization is a more linguistically grounded and controlled normalization approach than stemming. It uses context, part-of-speech information, and morphology to recover the dictionary base form of a word. As a result, it often produces more reliable outcomes in search, classification, and information extraction tasks where semantic consistency matters. In morphologically rich languages, high-quality lemmatization can make a substantial difference.