17.2 Text Preprocessing
Fantastic! Now that you've successfully gathered your data, the next crucial step is Text Preprocessing. You see, raw text data can often be messy and filled with irrelevant information. Cleaning it up and transforming it into a format that's easier for a machine to understand is essential for accurate sentiment analysis.
The main aim of text preprocessing is to reduce the complexity of the text while retaining its essential features. This involves several techniques like tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, removing stop words, and so forth.
Let's continue with our Twitter sentiment analysis example. Once you have the tweets, you might notice that they contain mentions, URLs, and special characters that won't be useful in understanding the sentiment. Our first task is to clean the tweets.
17.2.1 Cleaning Tweets
To clean the tweets, you can use Python's re library to remove unwanted characters. Here's how you can clean a tweet...