Instruction: Explain what text normalization is and why it is important in NLP.
Context: This question tests the candidate's knowledge of the preprocessing steps required to clean and standardize text data.
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The way I'd think about it is this: Text normalization is the process of converting raw text into a more consistent form before modeling. That can include lowercasing, removing extra whitespace, standardizing punctuation, expanding contractions, normalizing numbers, or handling...