Questions:

Good questions, all - we generally try to give a full accounting of how the data was cleansed/massaged/modified/etc. The goal of the description would be for the reader to be able to grab the same sort of raw data and do the same cleansing on it and, hopefully, produce similar results.
For the sort of the text data (natural language processing) I've worked on, we'll have one or more paragraphs in the paper explaining what we did (e.g., replaced all dates with with "**DATE**"; lower-cased all text; removed all punctuation; dropped records without values in all fields; ...) and then report how many records we started with and how many we had left after cleansing.

