Define the language task narrowly
State whether you need intent classification, entity extraction, search matching or another outcome.
Read this step →Language technology / a practical field guide
Turn messy text into a testable language task
A practical briefing guide for search, classification and multilingual text processing.
Start with the decisions that matter
Inspect the actual text
Look at spelling variation, mixed scripts, punctuation, transliteration and domain-specific abbreviations.
Read this step →Document preprocessing decisions
Specify how whitespace, case and Unicode representation are handled.
Read this step →A concrete example
A delivery classifier works on formal English but fails on mixed-language customer messages. The team adds representative, appropriately handled examples to evaluation, records recurring errors and defines a review queue. It avoids claiming broad language support from one clean test set.
Turn the guide into an action plan
Use the worksheet to record evidence, open questions and the next person responsible. Check only the items you have actually reviewed. Download a text copy or print your working notes.
Open the linguistics worksheet →