Lemmatize French text

The best solution I found is spacy, it seems to do the job

To install:

pip3 install spacy
python3 -m spacy download fr_core_news_md

To use:

import spacy
nlp = spacy.load('fr_core_news_md')

doc = nlp(u"voudrais non animaux yeux dors couvre.")
for token in doc:
    print(token, token.lemma_)

Result:

voudrais vouloir
non non
animaux animal
yeux oeil
dors dor
couvre couvrir

checkout the documentation for more details: https://spacy.io/models/fr && https://spacy.io/usage

Here's an old but relevant comment by an nltk dev. Looks like most advanced stemmers in nltk are all English specific:

The nltk.stem module currently contains 3 stemmers: the Porter stemmer, the Lancaster stemmer, and a Regular-Expression based stemmer. The Porter stemmer and Lancaster stemmer are both English- specific. The regular-expression based stemmer can be customized to use any regular expression you wish. So you should be able to write a simple stemmer for non-English languages using the regexp stemmer. For example, for french:

from nltk import stem
stemmer = stem.Regexp('s$|es$|era$|erez$|ions$| <etc> ')

But you'd need to come up with the language-specific regular expression yourself. For a more advanced stemmer, it would probably be necessary to add a new module. (This might be a good student project.)

For more information on the regexp stemmer:

http://nltk.org/doc/api/nltk.stem.regexp.Regexp-class.html

-Edward

Note: the link he gives is dead, see here for the current regexstemmer documentation.

The more recently added snowball stemmer appears to be able to stem French though. Let's put it to the test:

>>> from nltk.stem.snowball import FrenchStemmer
>>> stemmer = FrenchStemmer()
>>> stemmer.stem('voudrais')
u'voudr'
>>> stemmer.stem('animaux')
u'animal'
>>> stemmer.stem('yeux')
u'yeux'
>>> stemmer.stem('dors')
u'dor'
>>> stemmer.stem('couvre')
u'couvr'

As you can see, some results are a bit dubious.

Not quite what you were hoping for, but I guess it's a start.