A corpus is the complete set of language data intended for analysis in natural language processing (NLP). It is typically a balanced and representative collection of documents that mirrors the types of content an NLP solution will encounter in real-world applications. This includes maintaining a proper distribution of topics, concepts, and writing styles relevant to the production environment.
A well-curated corpus ensures accurate training and evaluation of NLP models, providing a foundation for understanding and processing natural language effectively. Examples of corpora include text collections for sentiment analysis, language translation, or speech recognition.