Best Practices
Learn about the best practices for handling irrelevant text data.
We'll cover the following...
Robust data preprocessing
In this lesson, we’ll cover some best practices to adopt when dealing with irrelevant text data. We’ll start by covering robust data preprocessing, which involves handling irrelevant text data by cleaning and transforming the data into a format that can be effectively analyzed. This might mean undertaking several steps, such as tokenization, stopword removal, stemming or lemmatization, and noise removal from the text. Here’s a code example that explores robust data preprocessing using NLTK:
import nltkfrom nltk.corpus import stopwordsfrom nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize, RegexpTokenizerimport renltk.download('punkt', quiet=True)nltk.download('stopwords', quiet=True)def preprocess_text(text):text = text.lower()tokenizer = RegexpTokenizer(r'\w+')tokens = tokenizer.tokenize(text)stop_words = set(stopwords.words('english'))tokens_without_stopwords = [token for token in tokens if token.lower() not in stop_words]combined_text = ' '.join(tokens_without_stopwords)processed_text = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]', '', combined_text)return processed_texttext = "I'll be going to the park, and we're meeting at 3 o'clock. It's a beautiful day!"processed_text = preprocess_text(text)print(processed_text)
Let’s review the code line by line:
Lines 1–6: We import the necessary modules and download the required NLTK resources for text processing.
Lines 8–16: We define the
preprocess_text
function that takes a text as input and performs various preprocessing steps on it:We convert ...