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Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Unicode Normalization

The process of converting visually identical but differently encoded characters into a standard form.

Unicode normalization is a critical preprocessing step for multilingual text processing and data consistency. The same character may appear in combined or decomposed forms, which can break search, matching, and tokenization behavior. It is especially important in systems handling Turkish, Arabic, French, and multilingual user input. For robust NLP systems, character-level consistency has a greater impact than it often appears to have.