What are stopwords?
Instruction: Define stopwords and explain their significance in NLP.
Context: This question aims to assess the candidate's understanding of common preprocessing steps in text analysis.
Updated
Example Answer
Stopwords are very common words like "the," "and," or "is" that may carry little discriminative value in some NLP tasks. People often remove them to reduce noise and dimensionality in older or simpler pipelines.
But I would not remove them automatically. In some tasks, stopwords matter for meaning, sentiment, or syntax. Their value depends on the model and use case.
Common Poor Answer
A weak answer says stopwords are useless words, which is too broad and ignores tasks where they matter.