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Python module for creating n-grams from a chunk of text.
branch: master

Ngram Builder

You'll find this library handy if you're interested in extracting n-grams from chunks of text.


$ sudo python install


These code snippets should give you an idea of what you can do with it:

>>> counter = ngb.Counter()
>>> builder = ngb.NgramBuilder()
>>> text = "One response to this kind of shortcoming is to abandon the simple or strict n-gram model and introduce features from traditional linguistic theory, such as hand-crafted state variables that represent, for instance, the position in a sentence, the general topic of discourse or a grammatical state variable. Some of the best parsers of English currently in existence are roughly of this form."
>>> for i in range(1, 4):
...     counter.add(builder.find_ngrams(text, i))

At this point we have a dictionary containing n-grams of one, two or three words in length mapped to the number of times that each n-gram occurred.

Because the corpus of text was so small it's quite likely that most n-grams will only occur once, but let's see what else we've got:

>>> for ngram, count in counter.iteritems():
...     if count > 1:
...         print ngram, count
to 2
the 4
state 2
of 5
or 2
this 2
in 2

If you're using this library seriously you should experiment with ngb.Counter.remove_subphrases -- it can come in very handy. It removes n-grams that are part of a longer n-gram if the shorter n-gram appears just as frequently as the longer n-gram (which means that it can only be present within the longer n-gram).

In this example, it removes the majority of our n-grams.

>>> len(counter)
>>> counter.remove_subphrases()
>>> len(counter)

Finally, if you're not interested in stop words, we can really reduce the set further by passing a set of words that are to be ignored to the builder:

>>> builder = ngb.NgramBuilder(ngb.stopwords)
>>> counter = ngb.Counter()
...     counter.add(builder.find_ngrams(text, i))
>>> counter.remove_subphrases()
>>> len(counter)
>>> ngrams = counter.keys()
>>> ngrams.sort()
>>> for ngram in ngrams:
...     print ngram
abandon the simple
best parsers
currently in existence
discourse or grammatical
english currently
existence are roughly
features from traditional
general topic
grammatical state variable
hand-crafted state variables
instance the position
introduce features
kind of shortcoming
linguistic theory such
model and introduce
one response
parsers of english
position in sentence
represent for instance
sentence the general
simple or strict
state variable some
strict n-gram model
such as hand-crafted
topic of discourse
traditional linguistic theory
variables that represent
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