In the colorful digital world, Robo the language wizard was back! Today, he wanted to teach his friends Mia, Ali, and Zara a secret: how computers get words ready for understanding. This secret is called Text Preprocessing.
“Before I can read or understand any words,” Robo said, “I need to clean them up and organize them. Let me show you how!”
1. Tokenization — Cutting Words into Pieces
Robo waved his wand, and a long sentence floated in the air:
“I love eating chocolate ice cream!”
“First, we need to break it into pieces,” Robo said. With a quick clap, the sentence split into little word blocks:
“I” | “love” | “eating” | “chocolate” | “ice” | “cream”
“This is called Tokenization. Computers slice sentences into tiny pieces called tokens, so they can understand each word!”
2. Lowercasing — Making All Words Friendly
Next, Robo looked at some words written in big and small letters:
“I Love ICE Cream!”
Robo waved his hand and all the letters became small:
“i love ice cream”
“This is called Lowercasing. Computers treat big letters and small letters as the same. It’s like making all the words friends so they can play together nicely.”
3. Stemming — Cutting Words to Their Roots
Then, Robo showed some tricky words:
“playing, played, plays”
He waved his wand, and all the words became:
“play, play, play”
“This is called Stemming,” Robo explained. “It cuts words to their roots so computers can understand different forms of the same word. It’s like finding the family root of each word!”
4. Lemmatization — Making Words Proper Again
Finally, Robo showed words that looked a little messy:
“better, running, mice”
He waved his hand, and the words turned into:
“good, run, mouse”
“This is called Lemmatization,” Robo said. “It changes words to their proper dictionary form. Computers understand them better this way.”
Robo’s Big Message
Robo turned to his friends and said, “If we tokenize, lowercase, stem, and lemmatize, words become neat, organized, and ready for magic. Only then can computers read, classify, translate, or even write stories!”
Mia, Ali, and Zara cheered. “Wow, Robo! Your secret toolbox makes words so powerful!”
Robo smiled. “And now, you know the first secret of every NLP wizard. Practice this, and one day you can teach your robots too!”
Mini Challenge for You:
Take a sentence like:
“Cats are running faster than dogs.”
Try to tokenize it, lowercase it, stem it, and lemmatize it — just like Robo!