Process of reducing inflected words to their word stem
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6 identifiers linking stemming across the web's reference databases
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In linguistic morphology and information retrieval, stemming is the process of reducing inflected words to their word stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root. Algorithms for stemming have been studied in computer science since the 1960s. Many search engines treat words with the same stem as synonyms as a kind of query expansion, a process called conflation.