kontekstem

Kontekstem is a concept in computational linguistics designed to balance the benefits of stemming with the need to preserve contextual meaning. A kontekstem represents a word’s canonical stem together with a contextual tag that signals how the form is used in a particular linguistic or domain setting. The approach aims to reduce surface form variation while maintaining distinctions that are relevant to downstream tasks such as information retrieval or classification.

Methodology: The process begins with tokenization and morphological analysis to extract a stem from each token. Contextual features are gathered from the surrounding text, such as topic, domain, syntax, or sentiment. A mapping assigns each token to a kontekstem, typically by pairing the stem with a contextual label. This can be implemented with rule-based methods or learned by machine learning models that produce context-sensitive stems as features for downstream tasks. Some systems combine kontekstems with contextual embeddings to aid disambiguation.

Applications and advantages: By aggregating inflected forms under context-aware stems, kontekstem can reduce feature sparsity while preserving domain-sensitive distinctions. It has potential use in information retrieval, document classification, sentiment analysis, and cross-domain adaptation. Limitations include reliance on reliable context signals, language-specific morphology, and added computational complexity.

Examples: In sports and health literature, "running" and "ran" may map to kontekstem run with context sport, while "studies" in academic writing may map to kontekstem study with context education. The same surface form can yield different kontekstems depending on domain and usage.

See also: stemming, lemmatization, contextual word representations, polysemy, information retrieval.