Faster Lemmatization techniques in Python
<p>I am trying to find out a faster way to lemmatize words in a list (named <i> <strong>text</strong></i>) using the NLTK Word Net Lemmatizer. Apparently this is the most time consuming step in my whole program(used cProfiler to find the same). </p>

<p>Following is the piece of code that I am trying to optimize for speed -</p>

<pre><code>def lemmed(text):
    l = len(text)
    i = 0
    wnl = WordNetLemmatizer()
    while (i&lt;l):
        text[i] = wnl.lemmatize(text[i])
        i = i + 1
    return text
</code></pre>

<p>Using the lemmatizer decreases my performance by 20x. Any help would be appreciated.</p>