Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on the interaction between computers and humans through natural language. It involves the application of computational techniques to analyze and synthesize natural language and speech. NLP has a wide range of applications including sentiment analysis, machine translation, chatbots, and more.
Text preprocessing is the first step in NLP. It involves cleaning and preparing text data for analysis. Common preprocessing steps include:
- Tokenization: Splitting text into individual words or tokens.
- Lowercasing: Converting all text to lowercase to maintain consistency.
- Removing Punctuation and Stopwords: Filtering out non-essential words and punctuation.
- Lemmatization/Stemming: Reducing words to their base or root form.