# Investigating Large Language Models' Linguistic Abilities for Text Preprocessing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11482/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

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- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [Phi-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08905/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing via Large Pre-Trained Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01243/) (2021)
- [SemEval-2019 Task 6: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08983/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Few-Shot Clinical Information Extractors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12689/) (2022)
- [XLM-T: Multilingual Language Models in Twitter for Sentiment Analysis and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12250/) (2021)
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- [Zero-shot Generative Large Language Models for Systematic Review Screening Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06320/) (2024)
- [LemmaTag: Jointly Tagging and Lemmatizing for Morphologically-Rich Languages with BRNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.03703/) (2018)
- [Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Personalized Community Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22182/) (2024)
- [SE-PQA: Personalized Community Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16261/) (2023)
- [Joint Lemmatization and Morphological Tagging with LEMMING](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18308/) (2024)
- [Investigating Task Arithmetic for Zero-Shot Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00649/) (2025)
- [On the Role of Morphological Information for Contextual Lemmatization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00407/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text preprocessing is a fundamental component of Natural Language Processing, involving techniques such as stopword removal, stemming, and lemmatization to prepare text as input for further processing and analysis. Despite the context-dependent nature of the above techniques, traditional methods usually ignore contextual information. In this paper, we investigate the idea of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform various preprocessing tasks, due to their ability to take context into account without requiring extensive language-specific annotated resources. Through a comprehensive evaluation on web-sourced data, we compare LLM-based preprocessing (specifically stopword removal, lemmatization and stemming) to traditional algorithms across multiple text classification tasks in six European languages. Our analysis indicates that LLMs are capable of replicating traditional stopword removal, lemmatization, and stemming methods with accuracies reaching 97%, 82%, and 74%, respectively. Additionally, we show that ML algorithms trained on texts preprocessed by LLMs achieve an improvement of up to 6% with respect to the F1 measure compared to traditional techniques. Our code, prompts, and results are publicly available at https://github.com/GianCarloMilanese/llmpipelinewi-iat.
