Text Normalization

Text normalization is an NLP preprocessing pipeline that converts noisy, abbreviated, or misspelled text — such as SMS messages, social-media posts, and OCR output — into a clean, standardised form. It is a prerequisite step for virtually every downstream NLP task, ensuring that inconsistent surface forms do not degrade tokenisation, parsing, or classification. The method gained systematic academic treatment through Baldwin and Li (2015) and Sproat and Jaitly (2017).