What is NLTK and how can I use it for text preprocessing?

What is NLTK and how can I use it for text preprocessing?

NLTK, or Natural Language Toolkit, is a Python library for working with human language data. It provides tools for text preprocessing like tokenization, stemming, and lemmatization.

Can you explain tokenization and why it's important?

Tokenization is the process of breaking down text into smaller units, called tokens. It's important because it helps in analyzing the structure of the text and prepares it for further processing.

What are stemming and lemmatization, and how do they differ?

Stemming reduces words to their root form, while lemmatization considers the context and converts words to their base form. Lemmatization is generally more accurate.

How can I implement these techniques using NLTK?

You can implement these techniques by importing NLTK and using functions like nltk.word_tokenize() for tokenization, and nltk.stem.PorterStemmer() for stemming.