Stemming and Lemmatization: A Comparison of Retrieval Performances

Abstract—The current study proposes to compare document retrieval precision performances based on language modeling techniques, particularly stemming and lemmatization. Stemming is a procedure to reduce all words with the same stem to a common form whereas lemmatization removes inflectional endings and returns the base or dictionary form of a word. Comparisons were also made between these two techniques with a baseline ranking algorithm (i.e. with no language processing). A search engine was developed and the algorithms were tested based on a test collection. Both mean average precisions and histograms indicate stemming and lemmatization to outperform the baseline algorithm. As for the language modeling techniques, lemmatization produced better precision compared to stemming, however the differences are insignificant. Overall the findings suggest that language modeling techniques improves document retrieval, with lemmatization technique producing the best result.

Index Terms—Document retrieval, language models, lemmatization, stemming.

The authors are with the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (e-mail: vimala.balakrishnan@um.edu.my, ethel_lloyd@siswa.um.edu.my).

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Cite: Vimala Balakrishnan and Ethel Lloyd-Yemoh, "Stemming and Lemmatization: A Comparison of Retrieval Performances," Lecture Notes on Software Engineering vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 262-267, 2014.