What is the difference between lemmatization vs stemming?
Short and dense: http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/stemming-and-lemmatization-1.html
The goal of both stemming and lemmatization is to reduce inflectional forms and sometimes derivationally related forms of a word to a common base form.
However, the two words differ in their flavor. Stemming usually refers to a crude heuristic process that chops off the ends of words in the hope of achieving this goal correctly most of the time, and often includes the removal of derivational affixes. Lemmatization usually refers to doing things properly with the use of a vocabulary and morphological analysis of words, normally aiming to remove inflectional endings only and to return the base or dictionary form of a word, which is known as the lemma .
From the NLTK docs:
Lemmatization and stemming are special cases of normalization. They identify a canonical representative for a set of related word forms.
Lemmatisation is closely related to stemming. The difference is that a stemmer operates on a single word without knowledge of the context, and therefore cannot discriminate between words which have different meanings depending on part of speech. However, stemmers are typically easier to implement and run faster, and the reduced accuracy may not matter for some applications.
For instance:
The word "better" has "good" as its lemma. This link is missed by stemming, as it requires a dictionary look-up.
The word "walk" is the base form for word "walking", and hence this is matched in both stemming and lemmatisation.
The word "meeting" can be either the base form of a noun or a form of a verb ("to meet") depending on the context, e.g., "in our last meeting" or "We are meeting again tomorrow". Unlike stemming, lemmatisation can in principle select the appropriate lemma depending on the context.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmatisation
There are two aspects to show their differences:
A stemmer will return the stem of a word, which needn't be identical to the morphological root of the word. It usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem,even if the stem is not in itself a valid root, while in lemmatisation, it will return the dictionary form of a word, which must be a valid word.
In lemmatisation, the part of speech of a word should be first determined and the normalisation rules will be different for different part of speech, while the stemmer operates on a single word without knowledge of the context, and therefore cannot discriminate between words which have different meanings depending on part of speech.
Reference http://textminingonline.com/dive-into-nltk-part-iv-stemming-and-lemmatization