Text Preprocessing for NLP: A Step-by-Step Guide to Clean Raw Text Data

Author(s): Adipta Martulandi

Originally published on Towards AI.

A Beginner’s Guide to Cleaning and Preparing Text Data for NLP Models + Hands-on with Python

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Natural Language Processing (NLP) is at the heart of many groundbreaking applications, from chatbots and virtual assistants to sentiment analysis and machine translation. However, before any NLP model can perform effectively, the raw text data must undergo preprocessing. This crucial step ensures the text is clean, standardized, and ready for analysis, enabling models to extract meaningful insights and make accurate predictions.

Building a Natural Language Processing (NLP) project involves several key stages, from collecting raw text data to deploying a fully functional model. Each stage plays a crucial role in ensuring that the NLP system is accurate, efficient, and reliable. Picture above depicts step-by-step of a typical NLP pipeline.

Inconsistencies in Formatting: Text from multiple sources may include different capitalization, spelling conventions, and sentence structures.Presence of Noise: Stopwords (e.g., “the,” “is”), URLs, emojis, special characters, and numbers often need to be handled depending on the task.Unstructured Data: Raw text is inherently unstructured, making it challenging to extract useful features without preprocessing.

These challenges highlight the need for tailored text preprocessing pipelines that address the specific noise of the dataset.

Text preprocessing is the process of cleaning, normalizing,… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI