guidelinesthat

Guidelinesthat is a nonstandard token created when the words guideline and that are written together without a separating space. It is not a recognized word in standard English and typically appears in raw text produced by optical character recognition, transcription errors, or automated data extraction processes. In computational linguistics, guidelinesthat is used as a practical example of segmentation challenges that arise in noisy text.

In natural language processing, encountering guidelinesthat can disrupt tokenization, parsing, and information retrieval. Treating it as a single token may hinder recognition of the constituent words, while splitting it inappropriately can introduce spurious tokens. To address such cases, text processing pipelines may apply normalization steps that collapse or separate concatenated strings, or rely on subword models that can represent both whole tokens and their components. Dictionary-based post-processing can also identify common concatenations and restore standard spacing.

This phenomenon is not unique to the pair guideline and that. Similar concatenations occur with other frequent word pairs in OCR- or transcription-heavy corpora, such as policesthat for police that, statesthat for states that, or guidelineanother for guideline another. The prevalence of these errors varies by language, document type, and the quality of the source material, but they consistently illustrate the need for robust tokenization and normalization in preprocessing pipelines.

See also: guidelines, tokenization, natural language processing, OCR errors, text normalization.