How do I do word Stemming or Lemmatization?

If you know Python, The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) has a very powerful lemmatizer that makes use of WordNet.

Note that if you are using this lemmatizer for the first time, you must download the corpus prior to using it. This can be done by:

>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download('wordnet')

You only have to do this once. Assuming that you have now downloaded the corpus, it works like this:

>>> from nltk.stem.wordnet import WordNetLemmatizer
>>> lmtzr = WordNetLemmatizer()
>>> lmtzr.lemmatize('cars')
'car'
>>> lmtzr.lemmatize('feet')
'foot'
>>> lmtzr.lemmatize('people')
'people'
>>> lmtzr.lemmatize('fantasized','v')
'fantasize'

There are other lemmatizers in the nltk.stem module, but I haven't tried them myself.

I tried your list of terms on this snowball demo site and the results look okay....

• cats -> cat
• running -> run
• ran -> ran
• cactus -> cactus
• cactuses -> cactus
• community -> communiti
• communities -> communiti

A stemmer is supposed to turn inflected forms of words down to some common root. It's not really a stemmer's job to make that root a 'proper' dictionary word. For that you need to look at morphological/orthographic analysers.

I think this question is about more or less the same thing, and Kaarel's answer to that question is where I took the second link from.

Martin Porter's official page contains a Porter Stemmer in PHP as well as other languages.

If you're really serious about good stemming though you're going to need to start with something like the Porter Algorithm, refine it by adding rules to fix incorrect cases common to your dataset, and then finally add a lot of exceptions to the rules. This can be easily implemented with key/value pairs (dbm/hash/dictionaries) where the key is the word to look up and the value is the stemmed word to replace the original. A commercial search engine I worked on once ended up with 800 some exceptions to a modified Porter algorithm.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/man/morph.3WN

For a lot of my projects, I prefer the lexicon-based WordNet lemmatizer over the more aggressive porter stemming.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/links#PHP has a link to a PHP interface to the WN APIs.

Look into WordNet, a large lexical database for the English language:

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

There are APIs for accessing it in several languages.

The top python packages (in no specific order) for lemmatization are: spacy, nltk, gensim, pattern, CoreNLP and TextBlob. I prefer spaCy and gensim's implementation (based on pattern) because they identify the POS tag of the word and assigns the appropriate lemma automatically. The gives more relevant lemmas, keeping the meaning intact.

If you plan to use nltk or TextBlob, you need to take care of finding the right POS tag manually and the find the right lemma.

Lemmatization Example with spaCy:

# Run below statements in terminal once. 
pip install spacy
spacy download en

import spacy

# Initialize spacy 'en' model
nlp = spacy.load('en', disable=['parser', 'ner'])

sentence = "The striped bats are hanging on their feet for best"

# Parse
doc = nlp(sentence)

# Extract the lemma
" ".join([token.lemma_ for token in doc])
#> 'the strip bat be hang on -PRON- foot for good'

Lemmatization Example With Gensim:

from gensim.utils import lemmatize
sentence = "The striped bats were hanging on their feet and ate best fishes"
lemmatized_out = [wd.decode('utf-8').split('/')[0] for wd in lemmatize(sentence)]
#> ['striped', 'bat', 'be', 'hang', 'foot', 'eat', 'best', 'fish']

The above examples were borrowed from in this lemmatization page.

Do a search for Lucene, im not sure if theres a PHP port but I do know Lucene is available for many platforms. Lucene is an OSS (from Apache) indexing and search library. Naturally it and community extras might have something interesting to look at. At the very least you can learn how it's done in one language so you can translate the "idea" into PHP.

If I may quote my answer to the question StompChicken mentioned:

The core issue here is that stemming algorithms operate on a phonetic basis with no actual understanding of the language they're working with.

As they have no understanding of the language and do not run from a dictionary of terms, they have no way of recognizing and responding appropriately to irregular cases, such as "run"/"ran".

If you need to handle irregular cases, you'll need to either choose a different approach or augment your stemming with your own custom dictionary of corrections to run after the stemmer has done its thing.

The most current version of the stemmer in NLTK is Snowball.

You can find examples on how to use it here:

http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/api/nltk.stem.snowball2-pysrc.html#demo

I highly recommend using Spacy (base text parsing & tagging) and Textacy (higher level text processing built on top of Spacy).

Lemmatized words are available by default in Spacy as a token's .lemma_ attribute and text can be lemmatized while doing a lot of other text preprocessing with textacy. For example while creating a bag of terms or words or generally just before performing some processing that requires it.

I'd encourage you to check out both before writing any code, as this may save you a lot of time!

df_plots = pd.read_excel("Plot Summary.xlsx", index_col = 0)
df_plots
# Printing first sentence of first row and last sentence of last row
nltk.sent_tokenize(df_plots.loc[1].Plot)[0] + nltk.sent_tokenize(df_plots.loc[len(df)].Plot)[-1]

# Calculating length of all plots by words
df_plots["Length"] = df_plots.Plot.apply(lambda x : 
len(nltk.word_tokenize(x)))

print("Longest plot is for season"),
print(df_plots.Length.idxmax())

print("Shortest plot is for season"),
print(df_plots.Length.idxmin())



#What is this show about? (What are the top 3 words used , excluding the #stop words, in all the #seasons combined)

word_sample = list(["struggled", "died"])
word_list = nltk.pos_tag(word_sample)
[wnl.lemmatize(str(word_list[index][0]), pos = word_list[index][1][0].lower()) for index in range(len(word_list))]

# Figure out the stop words
stop = (stopwords.words('english'))

# Tokenize all the plots
df_plots["Tokenized"] = df_plots.Plot.apply(lambda x : nltk.word_tokenize(x.lower()))

# Remove the stop words
df_plots["Filtered"] = df_plots.Tokenized.apply(lambda x : (word for word in x if word not in stop))

# Lemmatize each word
wnl = WordNetLemmatizer()
df_plots["POS"] = df_plots.Filtered.apply(lambda x : nltk.pos_tag(list(x)))
# df_plots["POS"] = df_plots.POS.apply(lambda x : ((word[1] = word[1][0] for word in word_list) for word_list in x))
df_plots["Lemmatized"] = df_plots.POS.apply(lambda x : (wnl.lemmatize(x[index][0], pos = str(x[index][1][0]).lower()) for index in range(len(list(x)))))



#Which Season had the highest screenplay of "Jesse" compared to "Walt" 
#Screenplay of Jesse =(Occurences of "Jesse")/(Occurences of "Jesse"+ #Occurences of "Walt")

df_plots.groupby("Season").Tokenized.sum()

df_plots["Share"] = df_plots.groupby("Season").Tokenized.sum().apply(lambda x : float(x.count("jesse") * 100)/float(x.count("jesse") + x.count("walter") + x.count("walt")))

print("The highest times Jesse was mentioned compared to Walter/Walt was in season"),
print(df_plots["Share"].idxmax())
#float(df_plots.Tokenized.sum().count('jesse')) * 100 / #float((df_plots.Tokenized.sum().count('jesse') + #df_plots.Tokenized.sum().count('walt') + #df_plots.Tokenized.sum().count('walter')))