Exploring a Large Language Model on the ChatGPT Platform for Indonesian Text Preprocessing Tasks

Preprocessing is a crucial step in Natural Language Processing, especially for informal languages like Indonesian, which contain complex morphology, slang, abbreviations, and non-standard expressions. Traditional rule-based tools such as regex, IndoNLP, and Sastrawi are commonly used but often fall short in handling noisy, user-generated text. This study explores the capability of Large Language Model, particularly ChatGPT-o3, in performing Indonesian text preprocessing tasks, namely text cleaning, normalization, stopword removal, and stemming/lemmatization, and compares it to conventional rule-based approaches. Using two types of datasets, consisting of a small example dataset of five manually constructed sentences and a real-world dataset of 100 tweets about the Indonesian “Makan Bergizi Gratis” program, both preprocessing methods were applied and evaluated. Results show that ChatGPT-o3 performs equally well in text cleaning and significantly better in normalization. However, rule-based methods like IndoNLP and Sastrawi still outperform ChatGPT-o3 in stopword removal and stemming. These findings indicate that while ChatGPT-o3 demonstrates strong contextual understanding and linguistic flexibility, they may underperform in rigid, token-based operations without fine-tuning. This study provides initial insights into using Large Language Models as an alternative preprocessing engine for Indonesian text and highlights the need for hybrid approaches or improved prompt design in future applications.