  Text preprocessing is often the first step in the pipeline of a Natural
Language Processing (NLP) system, with potential impact in its final
performance. Despite its importance, text preprocessing has not received much
attention in the deep learning literature. In this paper we investigate the
impact of simple text preprocessing decisions (particularly tokenizing,
lemmatizing, lowercasing and multiword grouping) on the performance of a
standard neural text classifier. We perform an extensive evaluation on standard
benchmarks from text categorization and sentiment analysis. While our
experiments show that a simple tokenization of input text is generally
adequate, they also highlight significant degrees of variability across
preprocessing techniques. This reveals the importance of paying attention to
this usually-overlooked step in the pipeline, particularly when comparing
different models. Finally, our evaluation provides insights into the best
preprocessing practices for training word embeddings.
