diff --git a/fanoutqa/norm.py b/fanoutqa/norm.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..52eea10
--- /dev/null
+++ b/fanoutqa/norm.py
@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+import logging
+import re
+
+import ftfy
+
+log = logging.getLogger(__name__)
+
+
+class LazySpacy:
+    """Lazily load the spacy pipeline when needed to save memory."""
+
+    def __init__(self, model: str):
+        self.model = model
+        self.pipe = None
+
+    def _load_pipe(self):
+        import spacy
+
+        self.pipe = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
+
+    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
+        if self.pipe is None:
+            self._load_pipe()
+        return self.pipe(*args, **kwargs)
+
+
+nlp = LazySpacy("en_core_web_sm")
+
+
+def normalize(text, remove_stopwords=False):
+    """
+    Normalize a given string for string-based metrics. Specifically, this does the following:
+    - fix encoding errors (ftfy)
+    - normalize numbers
+    - lemmatize words
+    - remove stopwords (optional)
+    - remove punctuation
+    - remove redundant whitespace
+    """
+    text = str(text).lower()
+    text = ftfy.fix_text(text)
+    text = normalize_numbers(text)
+    text = lemmatize(text, remove_stopwords=remove_stopwords)
+    text = remove_punct(text)
+    text = normalize_whitespace(text)
+    return text
+
+
+def normalize_numbers(text: str):
+    """Use regex to normalize numbers with commas"""
+    # numbers with commas
+    comma_sub_text = re.sub(r"(\d+,)+\d+(\.\d+)?", lambda m: m[0].replace(",", ""), text)
+    return comma_sub_text
+
+
+def lemmatize(text: str, remove_stopwords=False):
+    """Return a normalized string with each word replaced by its lemmatized version."""
+    doc = nlp(text)
+    if remove_stopwords:
+        return " ".join(tok.lemma_ for tok in doc if not tok.is_stop)
+    return " ".join(tok.lemma_ for tok in doc)
+
+
+def remove_punct(text: str):
+    """Remove all punctuation from the string."""
+    return re.sub(r"[,.?!:;]", "", text)
+
+
+def normalize_whitespace(text: str):
+    """Replace all whitespace with a single space."""
+    return re.sub(r"\s+", " ", text)