Cookbook - Using more complex recipes involving text
In textrecipes: Extra 'Recipes' for Text Processing

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>"
)

Working to get textual data converted into numerical can be done in many different ways. The steps included in textrecipes should hopefully give you the flexibility to perform most of your desired text preprocessing tasks. This vignette will showcase examples that combine multiple steps.

This vignette will not do any modeling with the processed text as its purpose it to showcase the flexibility and modularity. Therefore the only packages needed will be recipes and textrecipes. Examples will be performed on the tate_text data-set which is packaged with modeldata.

library(recipes)
library(textrecipes)
library(modeldata)
data("tate_text")

Counting select words

Sometimes it is enough to know the counts of a handful of specific words. This can be easily be achieved by using the arguments custom_stopword_source and keep = TRUE in step_stopwords.

words <- c("or", "and", "on")

okc_rec <- recipe(~., data = tate_text) %>%
  step_tokenize(medium) %>%
  step_stopwords(medium, custom_stopword_source = words, keep = TRUE) %>%
  step_tf(medium)

okc_obj <- okc_rec %>%
  prep()

bake(okc_obj, tate_text) %>%
  select(starts_with("tf_medium"))

Removing words in addition to the stop words list

You might know of certain words you don't want included which isn't a part of the stop word list of choice. This can easily be done by applying the step_stopwords step twice, once for the stop words and once for your special words.

stopwords_list <- c(
  "was", "she's", "who", "had", "some", "same", "you", "most",
  "it's", "they", "for", "i'll", "which", "shan't", "we're",
  "such", "more", "with", "there's", "each"
)

words <- c("sad", "happy")

okc_rec <- recipe(~., data = tate_text) %>%
  step_tokenize(medium) %>%
  step_stopwords(medium, custom_stopword_source = stopwords_list) %>%
  step_stopwords(medium, custom_stopword_source = words) %>%
  step_tfidf(medium)

okc_obj <- okc_rec %>%
  prep()

bake(okc_obj, tate_text) %>%
  select(starts_with("tfidf_medium"))

Letter distributions

Another thing one might want to look at is the use of different letters in a certain text. For this we can use the built-in character tokenizer and keep only the characters using the step_stopwords step.

okc_rec <- recipe(~., data = tate_text) %>%
  step_tokenize(medium, token = "characters") %>%
  step_stopwords(medium, custom_stopword_source = letters, keep = TRUE) %>%
  step_tf(medium)

okc_obj <- okc_rec %>%
  prep()

bake(okc_obj, tate_text) %>%
  select(starts_with("tf_medium"))

TF-IDF of ngrams of stemmed tokens

Sometimes fairly complicated computations. Here we would like the term frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) of the most common 500 ngrams done on stemmed tokens. It is quite a handful and would seldom be included as a option in most other libraries. But the modularity of textrecipes makes this task fairly easy.

First we will tokenize according to words, then stemming those words. We will then paste together the stemmed tokens using step_untokenize so we are back at string that we then tokenize again but this time using the ngram tokenizers. Lastly just filtering and tfidf as usual.

okc_rec <- recipe(~., data = tate_text) %>%
  step_tokenize(medium, token = "words") %>%
  step_stem(medium) %>%
  step_untokenize(medium) %>%
  step_tokenize(medium, token = "ngrams") %>%
  step_tokenfilter(medium, max_tokens = 500) %>%
  step_tfidf(medium)

okc_obj <- okc_rec %>%
  prep()

bake(okc_obj, tate_text) %>%
  select(starts_with("tfidf_medium"))