Text normalization is a process by which text is transformed in some way to make it consistent in a way which it may not have been before. Text normalization is often performed before a text is processed in some way, such as generating synthesized speech, automated language translation, storage in a database, or comparison.
Examples of text normalization:
- Unicode normalization
- converting all letters to lower or upper case
- removing punctuation
- removing letters with accent marks and other diacritics
- expanding abbreviations
While this may be done manually, and usually is in the case of ad hoc and personal documents, many programming languages support mechanisms which enable text normalization.
The text normalization is useful, for example, for comparing two sequence of characters which mean the same but are represented differently. The examples of this kind of normalization include, but not limited to, "don't" vs "do not", "I'm" vs "I am", "Can't" vs "Cannot".
Further, "1" and "one" are same, "1st" is same as "first", and so on. Instead of treating these strings as different, through text processing, one can treat them as same.
 | This computer science article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |