Understanding Stemmers (Natural Language Processing)

Understanding Stemmers (Natural Language Processing)

I am interested in NLP and have already some experience with Apache Solr. It’s time to dig a little in-deep regarding stemmers. First of all, I was looking for a general definition of what a stemmer is, and I found this one, which IMHO is quite good:

stemmer — an algorithm for removing inflectional and derivational endings in order to reduce word forms to a common stem