Stemming is supposed to improve the average performance of an information retrieval system, but in practice, past experimental results show that this is not always the case. In this article, we propose a selective approach to stemming that decides whether stemming should be applied or not on a query basis. Our method aims at minimizing the risk of failure caused by stemming in retrieving semantically-related documents. The proposed work mainly contributes to the IR literature by proposing an application of selective stemming and a set of new features that derived from the term frequency distributions of the systems in selection. The method based on the approach leverages both some of the query performance predictors and the derived features and a machine learning technique. It is comprehensively evaluated using three rule-based stemmers and eight query sets corresponding to four document collections from the standard TREC and NTCIR datasets. The document collections, except for one, include Web documents ranging from 25 million to 733 million. The results of the experiments show that the method is capable of making accurate selections that increase the robustness of the system and minimize the risk of failure (i.e., per query performance losses) across queries. The results also show that the method attains a systematically higher average retrieval performance than the single systems for most query sets.