Understanding Text for Data Science
Text is the primary medium of human communication—books, articles, social media,
messages, emails, and more. In data science and AI, text is a rich source of information but
also challenging to analyze because it is unstructured and requires preprocessing.
This guide will give you a deep understanding of text, how it is represented in computers, and
how AI models use text for tasks like classification, summarization, text generation, and text-
to-image/audio generation.
1️⃣ What is Text Data?
At the simplest level, text is a sequence of characters (letters, numbers, symbols).
📌 Example:
"The cat sat on the mat!"
This sentence consists of:
Words: "The", "cat", "sat", "on", "the", "mat"
Characters: T, h, e, c, a, t, s, a, t...
Punctuation: "!"
How is Text Stored in Computers?
Computers don't understand letters, so text is stored as numbers using character encoding
methods like:
✅ ASCII – Represents characters using numbers (A = 65, B = 66, …)
✅ 😊
Unicode (UTF-8) – Supports characters from all languages ( = U+1F60A)
📌 Example: ASCII Encoding
'A' → 65
'B' → 66
'C' → 67
📌 Example: UTF-8 Encoding (Multilingual Support)
'ह' (Hindi) → U+0939
'你' (Chinese) → U+4F60
' 😊' (Emoji) → U+1F60A
2️⃣ Types of Text Data
Text data can be broadly categorized into:
A. Structured Text
🔹 Well-organized, follows a specific format
🔹 Easy to analyze with tables, databases
🔹 Examples:
Spreadsheets
Database records
CSV files
📌 Example (Structured Text in CSV format)
Name, Age, Country
Alice, 25, USA
Bob, 30, India
Charlie, 28, UK
Here, each column (Name, Age, Country) follows a pattern.
B. Unstructured Text
🔹 Free-flowing text with no predefined format
🔹 Harder to analyze because of variations in writing style
🔹 Examples:
Emails
Blogs
Social media posts
Books
📌 Example (Unstructured Text - Social Media Post)
"OMG! 😱 This new phone is AMAZING!!! Can't believe the camera quality 😍📸
#BestPhoneEver"
💡 This text has emojis, hashtags, and informal language, making it difficult to analyze.
3️⃣ How is Text Processed in AI?
Since AI models work with numbers, text needs to be converted into numerical form.
A. Tokenization
Text is broken down into tokens (words, characters, or subwords).
📌 Example:
Sentence: "I love Python programming!"
Tokens: ["I", "love", "Python", "programming", "!"]
B. Stopword Removal
Common words like "is", "the", "and" are removed.
📌 Example:
Sentence: "The cat is sleeping on the mat."
Stopword Removal: ["cat", "sleeping", "mat"]
C. Lemmatization & Stemming
Reduces words to their base forms.
Stemming: "running" → "run"
Lemmatization: "better" → "good"
📌 Example:
Words: "running", "runs", "runner"
Stemming: "run"
4️⃣ Text-Based Tasks
A. Text Classification
Assigns categories to text, like spam detection, sentiment analysis, and topic classification.
Example: Sentiment Analysis
📌 Input: "I love this product!"
📌 Model Prediction: Positive 😊
🔹 Applications:
✅ Spam filtering (Spam/Not Spam)
✅ Sentiment analysis (Positive/Negative/Neutral)
✅ News categorization (Politics/Sports/Entertainment)
💡 Visualization Idea:
Use a word cloud to highlight the most frequent words in positive vs. negative reviews.
B. Text Summarization
Automatically shortens text while keeping key information.
Example: News Summarization
📌 Input:
"The stock market saw a significant rise today, driven by strong earnings from major tech
companies. Analysts predict continued growth in the coming months."
📌 Output (Summary):
"Stock market rises due to strong tech earnings."
🔹 Types of Summarization
✅ Extractive – Picks key sentences from the text
✅ Abstractive – Generates a new summary using AI
💡 Visualization Idea:
A before vs. after comparison of long articles and their summaries.
C. Text Generation (AI Writing Stories, Emails, Code, etc.)
AI can generate human-like text using models like GPT (ChatGPT), LLaMA, and Bard.
Example: AI Chatbot Response
📌 Input: "Tell me a joke."
📌 AI Output: "Why don't skeletons fight each other? Because they don't have the guts!" 😂
🔹 Applications:
✅ AI chatbots (customer support)
✅ Code generation (GitHub Copilot)
✅ Story & poetry writing (Creative AI)
💡 Visualization Idea:
Show a comparison of human-written and AI-generated text.
D. Text-to-Image Generation
AI converts text descriptions into images using models like DALL·E and Stable Diffusion.
Example:
📌 Input: "A cat wearing sunglasses, sitting on a beach."
📌 Output (AI-Generated Image): 🐱😎🏖️
🔹 Applications:
✅ AI-generated artwork 🎨
✅ Image-based storytelling 📖
✅ Game character design 🎮
💡 Visualization Idea:
Show the input text and the AI-generated images side by side.
E. Text-to-Audio Generation (AI Voices, Podcast, Music from
Text)
AI can generate human-like voices or even music from text input.
Example: AI Voice Assistant
📌 Input: "Hello, welcome to our store!"
📌 Output: 🔊 AI-generated speech
🔹 Applications:
✅ Text-to-speech (Google Assistant, Siri)
✅ AI voiceovers (YouTube, Audiobooks)
✅ AI music generation 🎶
💡 Visualization Idea:
Show a waveform of AI-generated speech.
4️⃣ Challenges in Text Analysis
🚧 Ambiguity – "Apple" 🍏 (fruit or company?)
🚧 Spelling Errors – "Ths is an amzing product!"
🚧 Sarcasm Detection – "Oh, great... another Monday!"
🚧 Bias in AI – AI models may learn biases from training data
5️⃣ Challenges in Text Analysis
🚧 Ambiguity – "Apple" (fruit or company?)
🚧 Spelling Errors – "Ths is an amzing product!"
🚧 Sarcasm Detection – "Oh, great... another Monday!"
🚧 Bias in AI – AI models may learn biases from training data
6️⃣ Summary Table
Task Example Input Example Output AI Models Used
Text Classification "This movie was Positive 😊 BERT, LSTM
fantastic!"
Summarization Long article Short summary T5, Pegasus
Text Generation "Write a short story AI-generated story GPT-4, LLaMA
about a dragon."
Text-to-Image "A futuristic city in AI-generated image DALL·E, Stable
the clouds." Diffusion
Text-to-Audio "Welcome to our AI-generated voice Tacotron, WaveNet
podcast!"
💡 Final Thoughts
Text-based AI is revolutionizing how we interact with technology. From chatbots to AI-
generated images and speech, the future is exciting! 🚀
