DEV Community

Seenivasa Ramadurai
Seenivasa Ramadurai

Posted on

NLP 101: Title: Lemmatization vs. Stemming: The Thoughtful Strategist vs. The Rule-Following Hacker.

Lemmatization is like someone telling you, "Take the time to understand the root of the issue, gather the right knowledge, and figure out the best solution based on context." It’s thoughtful and considers the bigger picture, just like how lemmatization looks at the meaning of the word and its role in the sentence to bring it to its proper, base form.

On the other hand, Stemming is like someone saying, "Just follow the rules, no need to overthink it. Cut things down to the basics, even if they don’t always make perfect sense." It’s a quicker, more rule-based approach, without worrying about the deeper understanding of the issue, much like how stemming chops off prefixes and suffixes, often producing a root that isn’t even a real word.

So, lemmatization is the thoughtful, context-aware approach, while stemming is the fast, rule-following shortcut. Both can work, but the way they approach problems is totally different.

Thanks
Sreeni Ramadorai

Image of Timescale

🚀 pgai Vectorizer: SQLAlchemy and LiteLLM Make Vector Search Simple

We built pgai Vectorizer to simplify embedding management for AI applications—without needing a separate database or complex infrastructure. Since launch, developers have created over 3,000 vectorizers on Timescale Cloud, with many more self-hosted.

Read more →

Top comments (0)

Billboard image

The Next Generation Developer Platform

Coherence is the first Platform-as-a-Service you can control. Unlike "black-box" platforms that are opinionated about the infra you can deploy, Coherence is powered by CNC, the open-source IaC framework, which offers limitless customization.

Learn more