Wordstring

Wordstring is a term used in text processing to denote a sequence of words represented as a single string. It typically refers to ordinary text where individual words and punctuation form a continuous sequence. In this sense, a wordstring is distinct from a single word or from an arbitrary collection of tokens, because it preserves the original textual form and order.

Wordstrings are stored and transmitted as character data using a text encoding such as UTF-8. The length can be measured in characters or bytes, depending on the encoding and language. In natural language processing, a wordstring is often subjected to tokenization to extract the individual word tokens, while the string itself may be normalized for case, diacritics, and punctuation.

Common operations on wordstrings include tokenization, lowercasing, stemming or lemmatization, stop-word removal, and frequency analysis. Wordstrings are also used as input for search indexing, with further processing to build inverted indexes. An example of a wordstring is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

Challenges arise with languages that do not separate words with spaces, hyphenated compounds, contractions, or scripts with complex punctuation. Handling multilingual wordstrings requires careful normalization and segmentation. Wordstrings underpin many text processing tasks, from search engines to corpus linguistics, where preserving meaning and order of words is important.