Dealing with stop words
Stop words are words that occur very frequently in a language. They generally do not add significant meaning to the text. Some common stop words include pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and articles. In the English language, examples of stop words include a, an, the, and, is, was, of, for, and not. This list may vary based on the language or context.
Before analyzing text, we should remove stop words so that we can focus on more relevant words in the text. Stop words typically do not have significant information and can cause noise within our dataset. Therefore, removing them helps us find insights easily and focus on what is most relevant.
However, the removal of stop words is highly dependent on the goal of our analysis and the type of task we perform. For example, the outcome of a sentiment analysis task can be misleading due to the removal of key stop words. This is highlighted here:
- Sample sentence: The food was not great.
- Sample...
