text
Text is the words people read and write. It is messages, books, emails, and anything made of letters and sentences.
What a model may hear
- plain string data programming and databases
- treat it as raw characters without formatting, not a number or date
- SMS message telecommunications
- assume a short 160-character message sent to a phone number
- machine-readable annotation machine learning datasets
- expect labeled training examples paired with categories or answers
- unstructured document information retrieval
- prepare to index, search, or extract from large bodies of words
- rendered glyph sequence computer graphics and fonts
- consider font files, layout engines, and display properties
Where people and models part ways
“Send me the text”
Meant: Email or message me the information
May be taken as: Format it as a raw code string or SMS protocol payload
Say instead: “Email me the information in plain words”
“Analyze this text”
Meant: Tell me what this article says
May be taken as: Run statistical NLP classification or sentiment scoring without summary
Say instead: “Summarize what this article means in plain language”
“Make it text-only”
Meant: No images or videos, just words
May be taken as: Strip all markup and structure including headings and paragraphs
Say instead: “Use only words, but keep headings and paragraphs for readability”
“Extract the text”
Meant: Pull out the readable words from this file
May be taken as: Dump raw OCR output or binary-encoded characters without cleaning
Say instead: “Pull out the readable words and fix any obvious scanning errors”
Tips
- Say 'plain words' or 'sentences' if you do not want technical string handling
- Say 'summarize' or 'explain' instead of 'analyze' unless you want statistics
- Mention 'headings' and 'paragraphs' if you want structure kept
- Say 'message' or 'email' instead of 'text' if you do not mean SMS
- Say 'readable words' if you want human-oriented output, not code
Often confused with
- string
- a programming data type, not natural language
- content
- broader, includes images and video
- copy
- specific to marketing or published writing
- script
- executable code, not just readable words
- document
- implies formatting and file structure
- corpus
- a collected body for linguistic study