I'm looking for the right term to look into when it comes to "normalize" (remove word inflections) English words. For example:
participation -> participate
changing -> change
granted -> grant
mangoes -> mango
leaves -> leaf
baked -> bake
baking -> bake
Since I'm not a native English speaker I don't know what terms I should search for. I tried normalize english words But the results are far from what I'm looking for.
I'm actually looking for a javascript component that does that.
I think the column on the right is the root.
A root (or root word) is a word that does not have a prefix in front of the word or a suffix at the end of the word. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family (this root is then called the base word), which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_(linguistics)
The process itself is stemming and a program that does it is a stemmer:
A stemmer is an algorithm that operates on the principle of recognizing “stem” words embedded in other words. These are helpful for lexical purposes, for example, in online dictionaries, for heuristics in file management, or anywhere else that semantic tools can help create order.
Stemmers pick up the inclusion of a core or stem word within a longer word. For example, a stemming algorithm might look at a word like “planning,” and correctly recognize that the root word or stem word is “plan.” This can be a helpful element of something that parses raw text for analysis, either for a website or some other project.
Techopedia
This is called lemmatizing. The lemma is the dictionary form of a word.
If you want precise technical language, the difference between a lemma and a stem is that a stem is a substring of the original word. For the word "better", the stem is something like "be-" or "bet-", and the lemma is "good". The lemma is what you want.
If you have a budget for a good lemmatizer, it can be helpful if you're making a search engine. If normalization isn't very crucial to your application, I believe the the Porter Stemmer and Snowball are free.
Of your examples, the relationship between "participation" and "participate" stands out, because that's not really an example of changing to another form of the same word. It is deriving a different word, because it's going from a noun to a verb. This is the difference between "derivational morphology" and "inflectional morphology".
