What is Stop Words?

Stop Words - a commonly used term in natural language processing, refers to words that are frequently occurring but do not carry much meaning. These words are typically excluded from search queries and text analysis algorithms as they do not provide useful information.

In simple terms, stop words are the common words such as "the", "and", "of" which appear very frequently in texts but have little or no significance when it comes to analyzing the overall meaning of the text. The removal of these stop words helps to reduce noise and improve the accuracy of analysis results.

The inclusion or exclusion of stop words can vary depending on the application domain and specific use case. In some cases, removing stop words may be detrimental to understanding the context, while in other cases it may be critical for accurate analysis.