On the other hand, if the word " " does appear in the training data but it has only a translation "gruel" as that is the meaning in the formal text, the translation system may wrongly translate " " into "gruel" for the informal text where the word " " is more likely to mean "like".
as a text-normalization step, it is desirable to transform the informal text into its standard formal equivalent before feeding it into a general-purpose text-processing system.