Modern text processing pipelines demand robust methods to remove extraneous content while preserving a document's core message. Traditional approaches such as HTML boilerplate extraction or keyword filters often fail in multilingual settings and struggle with context-sensitive nuances, whereas Large Language Models (LLMs) offer improved quality at high computational cost. We introduce SORE (Semantic Outlier Removal), a cost-effective, transparent method that leverages multilingual sentence embeddings and approximate nearest-neighbor search to identify and excise unwanted text segments. By first identifying core content via metadata embedding and then flagging segments that either closely match predefined outlier groups or deviate significantly from the core, SORE achieves near-LLM extraction precision at a fraction of the cost. Experiments on HTML datasets demonstrate that SORE outperforms structural methods and yield high precision in diverse scenarios. Our system is currently deployed in production, processing millions of documents daily across multiple languages while maintaining both efficiency and accuracy. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we release our implementation and evaluation datasets.

The massive collection of user posts across social media platforms is primarily untapped for artificial intelligence (AI) use cases based on the sheer volume and velocity of textual data. Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of AI that leverages bodies of documents, known as corpora, to train computers in human-like language understanding. Using a word ranking method, term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), to create features across documents, it is possible to perform unsupervised analytics, machine learning (ML) that can group the documents without a human manually labeling the data. For large datasets with thousands of features, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), k-means clustering and Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) are employed to learn top words and generate topics for a Reddit and Twitter combined corpus. Using extremely simple deep learning models, this study demonstrates that the applied results of unsupervised analysis allow a computer to predict either negative, positive, or neutral user sentiment towards plastic surgery based on a tweet or subreddit post with almost 90% accuracy. Furthermore, the model is capable of achieving higher accuracy on the unsupervised sentiment task than on a rudimentary supervised document classification task. Therefore, unsupervised learning may be considered a viable option in labeling social media documents for NLP tasks.

Outlier detection is a core task in data mining with a plethora of algorithms that have enjoyed wide scale usage. Existing algorithms are primarily focused on detection, that is the identification of outliers in a given dataset. In this paper we explore the relatively under-studied problem of the outlier explanation problem. Our goal is, given a dataset that is already divided into outliers and normal instances, explain what characterizes the outliers. We explore the novel direction of a semantic explanation that a domain expert or policy maker is able to understand. We formulate this as an optimization problem to find explanations that are both interpretable and pure. Through experiments on real-world data sets, we quantitatively show that our method can efficiently generate better explanations compared with rule-based learners.