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Multilingual Stopword Removal Utility for Text Pipelines

Added Jun 2025 3 design docs

High-frequency function words like the, and, and of dominate raw text while carrying little standalone meaning, and removing them is a standard early step in search indexing, topic modeling, and text classification. The task sounds trivial until real requirements arrive: multiple languages, different stopword inventories between libraries, and cases where removing a word like not quietly destroys meaning. The intern builds a Python command-line utility that removes stopwords from input text using both NLTK and spaCy, with support for multiple languages drawn from each library's stopword resources. The tool accepts text or files, lets users choose the library and language, and outputs the filtered text alongside statistics such as how many tokens were removed. The intern implements a comparison mode showing how NLTK's and spaCy's stopword lists differ for the same language, and supports custom additions and exclusions so users can protect words that matter for their task. The project grounds the intern in practical tokenization and text filtering across languages, teaches the judgment call hiding inside every default word list, and demonstrates the ability to build a small, well-behaved preprocessing tool that other pipelines can depend on, complete with clear command-line ergonomics.

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