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Welcome, data science enthusiasts and budding coders! Today, we’re embarking on an exciting journey through the realms of text normalization, specifically focusing on stemming and lemmatization using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) in Python. These techniques are fundamental in the preprocessing steps for natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning tasks, helping to transform text data into a more manageable and analyzable form. Let’s demystify these concepts with simple explanations and rich examples.

Understanding Text Normalization

Text normalization is the process of transforming text into a uniform format. This is crucial for tasks like sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and text classification, where consistency in word forms can significantly impact the performance of your models. Two primary techniques for achieving this are stemming and lemmatization.

There are two processes used in such cases.

1. Stemming
2. Lemmatization

Stemming

Stemming is a heuristic process that chops off the ends of words in the hope of achieving the goal correctly most of the time. It’s like cutting branches off a tree to its stem. The idea is to remove common prefixes and suffixes from a word, bringing it down to its base or root form, known as the “stem”. However, this process is relatively simple and can sometimes lead to inaccuracies or the creation of non-existent words.

While stemming only uses the word stems, lemmatization reduces the word to a root while preserving the sentence context. So “unable” wouldn’t become “able” in a lemmatizer. Stemmers and lemmatization are used to understand queries in chatbots and search engines. Stemmers may be faster, but their accuracy is not up to par with a lemmatizer.

Lemmatization

Lemmatization, on the other hand, is a more sophisticated approach. It involves morphological analysis of words, aiming to remove inflectional endings to return the base or dictionary form of a word, known as the “lemma”. Unlike stemming, lemmatization understands the context and part of speech of a word, leading to more accurate results.

Problem Statement

So we are making a chatbot to greet newcomers to the site and also. And it should give some basic answers on python. Even if we train the chatbot with a normal corpus, it won’t be that effective. So we must first process the words to their core. So this part of article will create a preprocessed tokenized and words. Which can be efficiently utilized to create a chatbot.

In the following code, we will import libraries necessary for importing a corpus on our runtime session.

Import libraries and corpus

import nltk
# download stopwords list for cleaning documents
nltk.download('stopwords')
# download for help in tokenizing
nltk.download('punkt')
# for using in lemmatizer
nltk.download('wordnet')
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
stop = stopwords.words('english')
# part of speech tagger
nltk.download('averaged_perceptron_tagger')

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
with open('/content/drive/MyDrive/Python Course/NLP/TFIDF/corpustfidf.txt','r', encoding='utf8',errors='ignore') as file:
    study = file.read().lower()
print(study)

python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language.
its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation.
python features is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected.

The actual corpus is much bigger. You can create your own corpus with your own information.

Tokenization

Tokenization is the process of breaking paragraphs into lists of sentences and sentences into lists of words. So overall, it is a double-nested list containing sentences broken into lists of words.

from nltk.tokenize import RegexpTokenizer
tokenizer=RegexpTokenizer(r'\w+')
tokens=[tokenizer.tokenize(x) for x in study.split('\n\n')]

Stemmers

Stemming is the process of reducing a word to its basic root or meaning. The stemming algorithm removes letters from the beginning or end of words. Stemming is used in information retrieval. The first stemmer was released in 1968. The best stemming algorithm so far is called Snowball.

Following is an example of stemming with python

from nltk.stem.porter import *
# create a porterstemmer object
stemmer = PorterStemmer()
for i in tokens:
    print(tokens)
    print([stemmer.stem(x) for x in tokens if x is not in stop])

['python', 'high', 'level', 'gener', 'purpos', 'program', 'languag']
['design', 'philosophi', 'emphas', 'code', 'readabl', 'use', 'signific', 'indent']
['python', 'featur', 'dynam', 'type', 'garbag', 'collect']

Lemmatization

The lemmatization process takes a more sophisticated approach to word reduction. It groups together words with similar inflection and uses the root word. Lemmatizers are used in places where context preservation and words both hold important value. Lemmatizers provide more accuracy. If the application is simple, then a stemmer will be used since it will be faster.

Take a look at the following code; we will be using WordNetLemmatizer from nltk for the lemmatization process.

from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer
stop = stopwords.words('english')
# create a lemmatizer object
lemma = WordNetLemmatizer()
# access corpus sentence by sentece
for i in tokens:
    #this one line for loop will break down sentences into words and process them. 
    print([lemma.lemmatize(x) for x in i if x not in stop])

['python', 'high', 'level', 'general', 'purpose', 'programming', 'language']
['design', 'philosophy', 'emphasizes', 'code', 'readability', 'use', 'significant', 'indentation']
['python', 'feature', 'dynamically', 'typed', 'garbage', 'collected']

the difference between the outputs below. Take “general-purpose” for an example while the stemmer removed the ‘e’ lemmatizer kept it without deforming the original word.

Compare stemmer and lemmatizer

['python', 'high', 'level', 'gener', 'purpos', 'program', 'languag']
['design', 'philosophi', 'emphas', 'code', 'readabl', 'use', 'signific', 'indent']
['python', 'featur', 'dynam', 'type', 'garbag', 'collect']

['python', 'high', 'level', 'general', 'purpose', 'programming', 'language']
['design', 'philosophy', 'emphasizes', 'code', 'readability', 'use', 'significant', 'indentation']
['python', 'feature', 'dynamically', 'typed', 'garbage', 'collected']

Lemmatization with POS tag

You might’ve also noticed that in the second sentence, “emphasises” didn’t change to emphasise in the lemmatizer. It may be hard for a lemmatizer to change a word if it isn’t known which part of speech it occupies. So we can use the (part of speech tag) pos_tag from the NLTK library, which creates a tuple of words and a part of speech tag. In the following code, the lemmatizer is given the word’s position tag:

from nltk.corpus import wordnet
nltk.download('averaged_perceptron_tagger')
lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()
# j= adjective , n= noun , v= verb , r= adverb 
pos_conv = {"j": 'a',"n": 'n',"v": 'v',"r": 'r'}
def lemmer(wor,tag):
    # lemmatizer takes two arguments word and it's pos tag
    return lemmatizer.lemmatize(wor,pos_conv.get(tag[0],'v'))
lem_doc=[[lemmer(x[0],x[1]) for x in nltk.pos_tag(i) if x[0] not in stop] for i in tokens]
for i in lem_doc:
    print(i)

['python', 'high', 'level', 'general', 'purpose', 'program', 'language']
['design', 'philosophy', 'emphasize', 'code', 'readability', 'use', 'significant', 'indentation']
['python', 'feature', 'dynamically', 'type', 'garbage', 'collect']

As you can see in the output above, we managed to have a significant difference in output. (“emphasize”, “program”, “type”)

Part of speech tagging was briefly demonstrated here; you may expect further articles on that topic.

Questions about stemmers and lemmatization

1. Is lemmatization better than stemmer?
   • Depends on the use case, if you need accuracy go for lemmatization and stemmer for speed.
2. How useful is stemming?
   • By using stemming, we can remove unnecessary parts of words and be free to retrieve information with good frequency.

Conclusion:

We can conclude that:

• We learned how to remove affixes from words efficiently and accurately.
• We learned when to use a stemmer and lemmatizer.
• We learned to use POS tags with a lemmatizer for greater accuracy.