diff --git a/server/concordia_preprocessor.py b/server/concordia_preprocessor.py
index bb80bb1..9ffcff8 100755
--- a/server/concordia_preprocessor.py
+++ b/server/concordia_preprocessor.py
@@ -3,13 +3,14 @@
 from flask import Flask
 from flask_restful import Api
 from server.lemmatizer_resource import LemmatizerResource
-import pickle, spacy
+import pickle
+from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer
 
 app = Flask('preprocessor')
 api = Api(app)
 
 
-lemmatizer = spacy.load('en', disable=['parser', 'ner'])
+lemmatizer = PorterStemmer()
 print("Lemmatizer initialized")
 
 pickle_in = open("dictionaries/dict.pickle","rb")
diff --git a/server/lemmatizer_resource.py b/server/lemmatizer_resource.py
index dc9a6d9..90ffbb3 100644
--- a/server/lemmatizer_resource.py
+++ b/server/lemmatizer_resource.py
@@ -42,7 +42,8 @@ class LemmatizerResource(Resource):
             if lemma is None:
                 lemma = word
         elif language == 'en':
-            doc = self.lemmatizer(word)
-            lemma = doc[0].lemma_
+            lemma = self.lemmatizer.stem(word)
+            if len(lemma) == 0:
+                lemma = word
         return lemma
 
diff --git a/tests/lemmatize_speed.py b/tests/lemmatize_speed.py
new file mode 100755
index 0000000..6d772e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/lemmatize_speed.py
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+#!/usr/bin/python3
+
+import requests, json, time
+
+
+def do_lemmatize(data):
+    response = requests.post(url = 'http://127.0.0.1:10002/lemmatize', json = data) 
+    return json.loads(response.text)
+
+
+start = time.time()
+data = {'language':'en', 'sentences':100*['this is just one of the sentences for testing']} 
+do_lemmatize(data)
+end = time.time()
+print("The operation took %.4f s" % (end - start))