Text preprocessing techniques for LLMs
Effective text preprocessing is crucial for preparing data for LLM training. We employ various techniques, including lowercasing, punctuation handling, whitespace normalization, special character handling, tokenization, number normalization, and contraction expansion. Tokenization is the process of breaking text into smaller units for further analysis or processing. Tokens are the smallest meaningful units of text in natural language processing. They can be words, but they could also include punctuation, numbers, or other elements depending on the tokenization strategy.
In addition, subword tokenization is an advanced text processing technique that breaks words into smaller meaningful units (subwords), enabling more efficient handling of rare words, compound words, and morphological variations in natural language processing tasks. Unlike traditional word-level tokenization, subword tokenization can identify common prefixes, suffixes, and root...