Is there a stop word list for twitter? - twitter

I want to do some mining on tweets. Is there any more specific stop word list for tweets such as removing "lol" and other twitter smiley?

I guess you should merge ordinary stop word list, like this one or that, with the specific acronyms dictionary, e.g. this slang dictionary, or that, or that, or that (the last one seems to be the easiest for parsing, see comments here for the idea).

I'm not aware of a specific stopwords list, but you could get a list of most frequent single words here:
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/amac/twitter_ngram/ (download en.1grams.gz)
To detect and then ignore smilies use: https://github.com/brendano/tweetmotif
You may also find these tools useful:
https://github.com/willf/segment (if you want to segment hashtags)
https://github.com/amacinho/Rovereto-Twitter-Tokenizer (if you don't)

I'm not aware of a Twitter-specific stop word list, but it is common practice to simply remove the n most frequent words from your analyses, where n could be 100, for example. Depending on what you would like to do, smileys may actually provide very relevant information.

Related

How to handle homophones in speech recognition?

For those who are not familiar with what a homophone is, I provide the following examples:
our & are
hi & high
to & too & two
While using the Speech API included with iOS, I am encountering situations where a user may say one of these words, but it will not always return the word I want.
I looked into the [alternativeSubstrings] (link) property wondering if this would help, but in my testing of the above words, it always comes back empty.
I also looked into the Natural Language API, but could not find anything in there that looked useful.
I understand that as a user adds more words, the Speech API can begin to infer context and correct for these, but my use case will not work well with this since it will often only want one or two words at most, limiting the effectiveness of context.
An example of contextual processing:
Using the words above on their own, I get these results:
are
hi
to
However, if I put together the following sentence, you can see they are all wrong:
I am too high for our ladder
Ideally, I would either get a list back containing [are, our], [to, too, two], [hi, high] for each transcription segment, or would have a way to compare a string against a function that supports homophones.
An example of this would be:
if myDetectedWord == "to" then { ... }
Where myDetectedWord can be [to, too, two], and this function would return true for each of these.
This is a common NLP dilemma, and I'm not so sure what might be your desired output in this application. However, you may want to bypass this problem in your design/architecture process, if possible and if you could. Otherwise, this problem is to turn into a challenge.
Being said that, if you wish to really get into it, I like this idea of yours:
string against a function
This might be more efficient and performance friendly.
One way, I'd be liking to solve this problem would be though RegEx processing, instead of using endless loops and arrays. You could maybe prototype loops and arrays to begin with and see how it works, then you might want to use regular expression for gaining performance.
You could for instance define fixed arrays in regular expressions and quickly check against your string (word by word, maybe using back-referencing) and you can add many boundaries in your expressions for string processing, as you wish.
Your fixed arrays also can be designed based on probabilities of occurring certain words in certain part of a string. For instance,
^I
vs
^eye
The probability of I being the first word is much higher than that of eye.
The probability of I in any part of a string is higher than that of eye, also.
You might want to weight words based on that.
I'd say the key would be that you'd narrow down your desired outputs as focused as possible and increase accuracy, [maybe even with 100 words if possible], if you wish to have a good/working application.
Good project though, I hope you like/enjoy the challenge.

How do I efficiently search through an ordered list?

I have a function that predicts a words being typed and returns the possibilities in an array. Unfortunately those aren’t sorted by frequency used. So I have a list of 10K ordered words listed by most frequent to less frequent. What would be an efficient way to compare the words in the array and the ordered list to return the most frequent one? (i.e the one it encounters first?)
I was tipped off by a friend to use a binary search tree but I really don't see how that helps me. From what I understood from the following website, only numerical values can be used.. Am I wrong in thinking so? Is there a better way of doing the aforementioned task?
Thanks in advance
You could create a dictionary with words as keys and frequencies as values. Then iterate over your result array, use the dictionary to obtain the frequency value for each item, and predict the item with the highest frequency.
I wouldn't use a vanilla binary search tree here. It would be possible - as Taylor Kirkpatrick says, you could just create a tree with words as keys and frequencies and use that to find the frequency for each result word, in much the same way as the dictionary solution.
The problem is that you cannot guarantee that a simple binary tree will be balanced. From the sound of it your data would probably be OK, since your words are in frequency order. The worst case would be if the words were in alphabetic order - then your binary tree would end up being identical to a linked list - it would never branch, since every node would attach to the right of the previous one. So the computational complexity of a search would be the same as iterating over the array of words - O(n) instead of O(log2N) (which is the best case for binary trees).
Of course, you could guard against this by randomising the list of words before doing the insert. But to my mind it's just easier to use a dictionary. I don't know what the actual implementation of Swift dictionaries is (and we won't until they open source it in a couple of months), but you can take it as read that it will out perform a vanilla BT for value retrieval.
I don't know what the background to this problem is - if you are learning CS it might be worth implementing the BST just for intellectual growth - in this case, with only 10,000 items you might find the performance differences are ultimately quite small. But if you are a working programmer trying to solve a problem, go with the dictionary approach.
You put all your words into a dictionary or a set. That's it. Dictionary if you have data associated with the words, set if you have no data and just want to know if the word is in the list or not.
You might want to use a Trie.
Put your word list into it. For every character entered, you traverse the Trie as deeply as you can and then show all paths to leaf nodes as possible completions.
Since the world like you have is likely static, you can precompute the Trie and load from disk/network/whatever at startup if performance is a concern.
You can use a binary search tree with anything as the actual value. To actually make use of the tree, use the frequency of the words as the numerical value. This is actually a pretty good solution to your problem. Each node of the tree will contain this word and a numeric value that represents the frequency of the word.
Here are a few links to help you out with making it.
Hope that helps.

detecting consecutive repeated letters from tweets

I am doing feature selection in machine learning, where i would like to detect words like happyyyyyyyyy,gooood,loooooooove and replace it as happy,good,love. I tried using regex to replace consecutive repeated letters with one of the same but if I do that, Works fine with looooooooove -> love and fails in goooooood -> god. I collected a list of English words like book,cool,chilling,breeze,etc but this list is not sufficient for my dataset. I need reference to continue , as collecting a list of words is really time consuming. Thanks for your replies.
To get your reference, use the regex (.)\1+
with something like grep to match words from a word list (take a look at Dictionary text file for a good place to start).
You should end up with a list of words that have consecutive letters, so you will have your reference.

Simple method to identify stop words

I'm making a simple search engine, and as I go through the documents that are going to be indexed, I want to automatically identify the words that should be ignored (such as "and" and "the").
The only simple method I can think of is just ignore words of up to a certain length (if they're not lengthy enough, then they're considered stop words). Any other method would probably have to require data mining (I'm open to suggestions).
I would prefer a method that I can use as i go through the documents, but I'm open to the other suggestions. I just need a simple method.
Short answer is: don't. As in don't bother, but instead strip them from the query and/or weigh them appropriately by TF-IDF.
Quoting the Xapian manual: http://xapian.org/docs/stemming.html
It has been traditional in setting up IR systems to discard the very commonest words of a language - the stopwords - during indexing. A more modern approach is to index everything, which greatly assists searching for phrases for example. Stopwords can then still be eliminated from the query as an optional style of retrieval. In either case, a list of stopwords for a language is useful.
Getting a list of stopwords can be done by sorting a vocabulary of a text corpus for a language by frequency, and going down the list picking off words to be discarded.

Validate words against an English dictionary in Rails?

I've done some Google searching but couldn't find what I was looking for.
I'm developing a scrabble-type word game in rails, and was wondering if there was a simple way to validate what the player inputs in the game is actually a word. They'd be typing the word out.
Is validation against some sort of English language dictionary database loaded within the app best way to solve this problem? If so, are there any libraries that offer this kind of functionality? If not, what would you suggest?
Thanks for your help!
You need two things:
a word list
some code
The word list is the tricky part. On most Unix systems there's a word list at /usr/share/dict/words or /usr/dict/words -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_(Unix) for more details. The one on my Mac has 234,936 words in it. But they're not all valid Scrabble words. So you'd have to somehow acquire a Scrabble dictionary, make sure you have the right license to use it, and process it so it's a text file.
(Update: The word list for LetterPress is now open source, and available on GitHub.)
The code is no problem in the simple case. Here's a script I whipped up just now:
words = {}
File.open("/usr/share/dict/words") do |file|
file.each do |line|
words[line.strip] = true
end
end
p words["magic"]
p words["saldkaj"]
This will output
true
nil
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to make it into a proper Words object. (Technically it's not a Dictionary since it has no definitions.) Or to use a DAWG instead of a hash, even though a hash is probably fine for your needs.
A piece of language-agnostic advice here, is that if you only care about the existence of a word (which in such a case, you do), and you are planning to load the entire database into the application (which your query suggests you're considering) then a DAWG will enable you to check the existence in O(n) time complexity where n is the size of the word (dictionary size has no effect - overall the lookup is essentially O(1)), while being a relatively minimal structure in terms of memory (indeed, some insertions will actually reduce the size of the structure, a DAWG for "top, tap, taps, tops" has fewer nodes than one for "tops, tap").

Resources