Stop Words

Stop words are high-frequency function words — such as 'the', 'is', 'and', and 'of' — that carry little semantic content and are often removed during text preprocessing to reduce noise and vocabulary size. Removing stop words shrinks feature vectors, speeds up processing, and can improve precision in keyword-based retrieval by eliminating common terms that would dominate frequency-based scores. However, some tasks such as authorship attribution or detecting negation require stop words because grammatical function words carry signal.