Stemming is a natural language processing technique used to reduce words to their base or root form. For example, the words "running," "runner," and "ran" can all be reduced to the root word "run." This process helps in simplifying text analysis by grouping similar words together, making it easier to understand the overall meaning of a text. The primary goal of stemming is to improve information retrieval and text mining by ensuring that variations of a word are treated as the same term. This is particularly useful in search engines and databases, where users may use different forms of a word when looking for information.