Which term refers to the process of simplifying a word to its base form based on its grammatical role?

Lemmatization refers to the process of reducing a word to its base or dictionary form, known as its lemma. This method involves understanding the context in which the word is used, particularly its grammatical role, which allows for the accurate transformation of various forms of a word into a single, standardized form. For instance, the words "running," "ran," and "runs" can all be lemmatized to "run" depending on their usage in a sentence.

Lemmatization is distinct from stemming, which simply truncates words to remove prefixes or suffixes without regard to grammatical role. This can sometimes lead to non-words or incorrect forms that may not have a meaningful representation in the context of natural language processing. Unlike intent analysis, which focuses on understanding user intentions in conversational contexts, and quantitative data analysis, which involves statistical methods to analyze numerical data, lemmatization is specifically concerned with language processing and word forms. Therefore, the definition provided aligns perfectly with the terminology used in linguistic processing and natural language understanding.