在自然语言处理领域，会遇到两个或多个单词具有共同根的情况。 例如，三个词 - agreed, agreeing 和 agreeable 具有相同的词根同意。 涉及任何这些词的搜索应将它们视为同一个词，即根词。 因此，将所有单词链接到根词中变得至关重要。 NLTK库具有执行此链接的方法，并提供显示根词的输出。

nltk中有三种最常用的词干算法。它们的结果略有不同。 以下示例显示了所有三种词干算法及其结果的使用。

import nltk
from nltk.stem.porter import PorterStemmer
from nltk.stem.lancaster import LancasterStemmer
from nltk.stem import SnowballStemmer 

porter_stemmer = PorterStemmer()
lanca_stemmer = LancasterStemmer()
sb_stemmer = SnowballStemmer("english",)

word_data = "Aging head of famous crime family decides to transfer his position to one of his subalterns" 
# First Word tokenization
nltk_tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(word_data)
#Next find the roots of the word
print '***PorterStemmer****\n'
for w_port in nltk_tokens:
   print "Actual: %s  || Stem: %s"  % (w_port,porter_stemmer.stem(w_port))

print '\n***LancasterStemmer****\n'    
for w_lanca in nltk_tokens:
      print "Actual: %s  || Stem: %s"  % (w_lanca,lanca_stemmer.stem(w_lanca))
print '\n***SnowballStemmer****\n' 

for w_snow in nltk_tokens:
      print "Actual: %s  || Stem: %s"  % (w_snow,sb_stemmer.stem(w_snow))

当运行上面的程序时，我们得到以下输出 -

***PorterStemmer****

Actual: Aging  || Stem: age
Actual: head  || Stem: head
Actual: of  || Stem: of
Actual: famous  || Stem: famou
Actual: crime  || Stem: crime
Actual: family  || Stem: famili
Actual: decides  || Stem: decid
Actual: to  || Stem: to
Actual: transfer  || Stem: transfer
Actual: his  || Stem: hi
Actual: position  || Stem: posit
Actual: to  || Stem: to
Actual: one  || Stem: one
Actual: of  || Stem: of
Actual: his  || Stem: hi
Actual: subalterns  || Stem: subaltern

***LancasterStemmer****

Actual: Aging  || Stem: ag
Actual: head  || Stem: head
Actual: of  || Stem: of
Actual: famous  || Stem: fam
Actual: crime  || Stem: crim
Actual: family  || Stem: famy
Actual: decides  || Stem: decid
Actual: to  || Stem: to
Actual: transfer  || Stem: transf
Actual: his  || Stem: his
Actual: position  || Stem: posit
Actual: to  || Stem: to
Actual: one  || Stem: on
Actual: of  || Stem: of
Actual: his  || Stem: his
Actual: subalterns  || Stem: subaltern

***SnowballStemmer****

Actual: Aging  || Stem: age
Actual: head  || Stem: head
Actual: of  || Stem: of
Actual: famous  || Stem: famous
Actual: crime  || Stem: crime
Actual: family  || Stem: famili
Actual: decides  || Stem: decid
Actual: to  || Stem: to
Actual: transfer  || Stem: transfer
Actual: his  || Stem: his
Actual: position  || Stem: posit
Actual: to  || Stem: to
Actual: one  || Stem: one
Actual: of  || Stem: of
Actual: his  || Stem: his
Actual: subalterns  || Stem: subaltern