Stopwordside

Stopwordside is an open-source project that provides a centralized collection of stopword lists and utilities for natural language processing. It aims to standardize how stopwords are defined and used across languages and NLP pipelines, enabling consistent filtering and text analysis.

The project emphasizes extensibility and reliability. It aggregates lists from existing corpora and community contributions, normalizes encodings and diacritics, and offers a simple API to query words, merge lists, or generate customized stopword sets for specific domains.

Key features include language coverage for dozens of languages, pluggable backends for fast lookups, diacritic-insensitive matching, options for case normalization, and support for multiword stop phrases in addition to single tokens.

Data and licensing: Stopwordside distributes under an open-source license and hosts its lists under a public repository. The word lists are curated to avoid common legitimate terms where possible and are tagged with provenance, versioning, and confidence levels.

Usage: developers integrate Stopwordside into preprocessing steps where stopword filtering is appropriate. The library provides functions to load lists for a given language, test whether a token is a stopword, and generate filtered token streams. It is designed to be language-agnostic and framework-agnostic.

Development: The project is maintained by a community of contributors with governance through a lightweight process. Roadmap elements typically include expanding language coverage, adding multiword stop phrases, and improving alignment with corresponding NLP libraries and datasets.