All you need to know about text preprocessing for NLP and Machine Learning

Based on some recent conversations, I realized that text preprocessing is a severely overlooked topic. A few people I spoke to mentioned inconsistent results from their NLP applications only to realize that they were not preprocessing their text or were using the wrong kind of text preprocessing for their project. With that in mind, I thought of shedding some light around what text preprocessing really is, the different methods of text preprocessing, and a way to estimate how much preprocessing you may need. For those interested, I've also made some text preprocessing code snippets for you to try. To preprocess your text simply means to bring your text into a form that is predictable and analyzable for your task.