Before you can initialize the lemmatizer, ensure you have the NLTK library installed via pip: pip install nltk Use code with caution.

WordNet Interface. WordNet is just another NLTK corpus reader, and can be imported like this: >>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet. NLTK :: Natural Language Toolkit Installing NLTK Data

To use the WordNetLemmatizer in NLTK, you must first download the underlying WordNet lexical database, which serves as the "dictionary" the lemmatizer references to find root words. How to Download NLTK WordNet

from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer # Initialize the lemmatizer lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer() # Basic lemmatization (default is NOUN) print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("bats")) # Output: bat print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("feet")) # Output: foot # Lemmatizing with Part-of-Speech (POS) tags for better accuracy print(lemmatizer.lemmatize("running", pos="v")) # Output: run Use code with caution. Why Do I Need to Download WordNet?

Once installed, run the following Python commands to download the required and omw-1.4 (Open Multilingual WordNet) resources:

Unlike simple stemmers that use rules to chop off word endings (e.g., Porter Stemmer), the performs a morphological analysis. It checks a large database to ensure the resulting root word is an actual word in the English language. Troubleshooting Common Issues Sample usage for wordnet - NLTK

import nltk # Essential for the lemmatizer to work nltk.download('wordnet') # Recommended for better language support and newer versions of WordNet nltk.download('omw-1.4') Use code with caution. Quick Start Example