>Now, if your NLP application doesn't rely on this data, sure, throw it away. But if you're looking at Twitter and throwing away any mentions, you're not really

>Now, if your NLP application doesn't rely on this data, sure, throw it away. But if you're looking at Twitter and throwing away any mentions, you're not really processing natural language, are you? The data is natural language, and your system is processing it. NLP doesn't mean "using computation to model exactly and completely the entire human language faculty". NLP is distinct from text processing in that often text files may contain forms of unstructured information other than natural language. The data being processed here is natural language.