The algorithm-based removal of morphological and inflectional word components, typically endings. Language dependent. Stemming is sometimes referred to as suffix stripping, although some stemming algorithms perform prefix stripping as well. Information retrieval systems use stemming to improve search quality and to reduce index size. Search Kit does not support stemming; if needed, client applications implement it. Some stemming algorithms handle only regular variants, such as converting “swimming” to “swim,” and do not handle irregular variants, such as converting “swam” to “swim.”