Converting to and from Document-Term Matrix and Corpus objects

Tidying document-term matrices

Many existing text mining datasets are in the form of a DocumentTermMatrix class (from the tm package). For example, consider the corpus of 2246 Associated Press articles from the topicmodels package:

library(tm)
data("AssociatedPress", package = "topicmodels")
AssociatedPress

## <<DocumentTermMatrix (documents: 2246, terms: 10473)>>
## Non-/sparse entries: 302031/23220327
## Sparsity           : 99%
## Maximal term length: 18
## Weighting          : term frequency (tf)

If we want to analyze this with tidy tools, we need to turn it into a one-term-per-document-per-row data frame first. The tidy function does this. (For more on the tidy verb, see the broom package).

library(dplyr)
library(tidytext)

ap_td <- tidy(AssociatedPress)

Just as shown in this vignette, having the text in this format is convenient for analysis with the tidytext package. For example, you can perform sentiment analysis on these newspaper articles.

ap_sentiments <- ap_td %>%
  inner_join(get_sentiments("bing"), by = c(term = "word"))

ap_sentiments

## # A tibble: 30,094 x 4
##    document term    count sentiment
##       <int> <chr>   <dbl> <chr>    
##  1        1 assault  1.00 negative 
##  2        1 complex  1.00 negative 
##  3        1 death    1.00 negative 
##  4        1 died     1.00 negative 
##  5        1 good     2.00 positive 
##  6        1 illness  1.00 negative 
##  7        1 killed   2.00 negative 
##  8        1 like     2.00 positive 
##  9        1 liked    1.00 positive 
## 10        1 miracle  1.00 positive 
## # ... with 30,084 more rows

We can find the most negative documents:

library(tidyr)

ap_sentiments %>%
  count(document, sentiment, wt = count) %>%
  ungroup() %>%
  spread(sentiment, n, fill = 0) %>%
  mutate(sentiment = positive - negative) %>%
  arrange(sentiment)

## # A tibble: 2,190 x 4
##    document negative positive sentiment
##       <int>    <dbl>    <dbl>     <dbl>
##  1     1251     54.0     6.00     -48.0
##  2     1380     53.0     5.00     -48.0
##  3      531     51.0     9.00     -42.0
##  4       43     45.0    11.0      -34.0
##  5     1263     44.0    10.0      -34.0
##  6     2178     40.0     6.00     -34.0
##  7      334     45.0    12.0      -33.0
##  8     1664     38.0     5.00     -33.0
##  9     2147     47.0    14.0      -33.0
## 10      516     38.0     6.00     -32.0
## # ... with 2,180 more rows

Or visualize which words contributed to positive and negative sentiment:

library(ggplot2)

ap_sentiments %>%
  count(sentiment, term, wt = count) %>%
  ungroup() %>%
  filter(n >= 150) %>%
  mutate(n = ifelse(sentiment == "negative", -n, n)) %>%
  mutate(term = reorder(term, n)) %>%
  ggplot(aes(term, n, fill = sentiment)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, hjust = 1)) +
  ylab("Contribution to sentiment")

Note that a tidier is also available for the dfm class from the quanteda package:

library(methods)

data("data_corpus_inaugural", package = "quanteda")
d <- quanteda::dfm(data_corpus_inaugural, verbose = FALSE)

d

## Document-feature matrix of: 58 documents, 9,357 features (91.8% sparse).

tidy(d)

## # A tibble: 44,709 x 3
##    document        term            count
##    <chr>           <chr>           <dbl>
##  1 1789-Washington fellow-citizens  1.00
##  2 1797-Adams      fellow-citizens  3.00
##  3 1801-Jefferson  fellow-citizens  2.00
##  4 1809-Madison    fellow-citizens  1.00
##  5 1813-Madison    fellow-citizens  1.00
##  6 1817-Monroe     fellow-citizens  5.00
##  7 1821-Monroe     fellow-citizens  1.00
##  8 1841-Harrison   fellow-citizens 11.0 
##  9 1845-Polk       fellow-citizens  1.00
## 10 1849-Taylor     fellow-citizens  1.00
## # ... with 44,699 more rows

Casting tidy text data into a DocumentTermMatrix

Some existing text mining tools or algorithms work only on sparse document-term matrices. Therefore, tidytext provides cast_ verbs for converting from a tidy form to these matrices.

ap_td

## # A tibble: 302,031 x 3
##    document term       count
##       <int> <chr>      <dbl>
##  1        1 adding      1.00
##  2        1 adult       2.00
##  3        1 ago         1.00
##  4        1 alcohol     1.00
##  5        1 allegedly   1.00
##  6        1 allen       1.00
##  7        1 apparently  2.00
##  8        1 appeared    1.00
##  9        1 arrested    1.00
## 10        1 assault     1.00
## # ... with 302,021 more rows

# cast into a Document-Term Matrix
ap_td %>%
  cast_dtm(document, term, count)

## <<DocumentTermMatrix (documents: 2246, terms: 10473)>>
## Non-/sparse entries: 302031/23220327
## Sparsity           : 99%
## Maximal term length: 18
## Weighting          : term frequency (tf)

# cast into a Term-Document Matrix
ap_td %>%
  cast_tdm(term, document, count)

## <<TermDocumentMatrix (terms: 10473, documents: 2246)>>
## Non-/sparse entries: 302031/23220327
## Sparsity           : 99%
## Maximal term length: 18
## Weighting          : term frequency (tf)

# cast into quanteda's dfm
ap_td %>%
  cast_dfm(term, document, count)

## Document-feature matrix of: 10,473 documents, 2,246 features (98.7% sparse).

# cast into a Matrix object
m <- ap_td %>%
  cast_sparse(document, term, count)
class(m)

## [1] "dgCMatrix"
## attr(,"package")
## [1] "Matrix"

dim(m)

## [1]  2246 10473

This allows for easy reading, filtering, and processing to be done using dplyr and other tidy tools, after which the data can be converted into a document-term matrix for machine learning applications.

Tidying corpus data

You can also tidy Corpus objects from the tm package. For example, consider a Corpus containing 20 documents, one for each

reut21578 <- system.file("texts", "crude", package = "tm")
reuters <- VCorpus(DirSource(reut21578),
                   readerControl = list(reader = readReut21578XMLasPlain))

reuters

## <<VCorpus>>
## Metadata:  corpus specific: 0, document level (indexed): 0
## Content:  documents: 20

The tidy verb creates a table with one row per document:

reuters_td <- tidy(reuters)
reuters_td

## # A tibble: 20 x 17
##    author  datetimestamp       description heading   id    language origin
##    <chr>   <dttm>              <chr>       <chr>     <chr> <chr>    <chr> 
##  1 <NA>    1987-02-26 10:00:56 ""          DIAMOND … 127   en       Reute…
##  2 BY TED… 1987-02-26 10:34:11 ""          OPEC MAY… 144   en       Reute…
##  3 <NA>    1987-02-26 11:18:00 ""          TEXACO C… 191   en       Reute…
##  4 <NA>    1987-02-26 11:21:01 ""          MARATHON… 194   en       Reute…
##  5 <NA>    1987-02-26 12:00:57 ""          HOUSTON … 211   en       Reute…
##  6 <NA>    1987-02-28 20:25:46 ""          KUWAIT S… 236   en       Reute…
##  7 By Jer… 1987-02-28 20:39:14 ""          INDONESI… 237   en       Reute…
##  8 <NA>    1987-02-28 22:27:27 ""          SAUDI RI… 242   en       Reute…
##  9 <NA>    1987-03-01 01:22:30 ""          QATAR UN… 246   en       Reute…
## 10 <NA>    1987-03-01 11:31:44 ""          SAUDI AR… 248   en       Reute…
## 11 <NA>    1987-03-01 18:05:49 ""          SAUDI FE… 273   en       Reute…
## 12 <NA>    1987-03-02 00:39:23 ""          GULF ARA… 349   en       Reute…
## 13 <NA>    1987-03-02 00:43:22 ""          SAUDI AR… 352   en       Reute…
## 14 <NA>    1987-03-02 00:43:41 ""          KUWAIT M… 353   en       Reute…
## 15 <NA>    1987-03-02 01:25:42 ""          PHILADEL… 368   en       Reute…
## 16 <NA>    1987-03-02 04:20:05 ""          STUDY GR… 489   en       Reute…
## 17 <NA>    1987-03-02 04:28:26 ""          STUDY GR… 502   en       Reute…
## 18 <NA>    1987-03-02 05:13:46 ""          UNOCAL <… 543   en       Reute…
## 19 By BER… 1987-03-02 07:38:34 ""          NYMEX WI… 704   en       Reute…
## 20 <NA>    1987-03-02 07:49:06 ""          ARGENTIN… 708   en       Reute…
## # ... with 10 more variables: topics <chr>, lewissplit <chr>,
## #   cgisplit <chr>, oldid <chr>, topics_cat <list>, places <list>,
## #   people <chr>, orgs <chr>, exchanges <chr>, text <chr>

Similarly, you can tidy a corpus object from the quanteda package:

library(quanteda)

data("data_corpus_inaugural")

data_corpus_inaugural

## Corpus consisting of 58 documents and 3 docvars.

inaug_td <- tidy(data_corpus_inaugural)
inaug_td

## # A tibble: 58 x 4
##    text                                           Year President FirstName
##  * <chr>                                         <dbl> <chr>     <chr>    
##  1 "Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the Ho…  1789 Washingt… George   
##  2 "Fellow citizens, I am again called upon by …  1793 Washingt… George   
##  3 "When it was first perceived, in early times…  1797 Adams     John     
##  4 "Friends and Fellow Citizens:\n\nCalled upon…  1801 Jefferson Thomas   
##  5 "Proceeding, fellow citizens, to that qualif…  1805 Jefferson Thomas   
##  6 "Unwilling to depart from examples of the mo…  1809 Madison   James    
##  7 "About to add the solemnity of an oath to th…  1813 Madison   James    
##  8 "I should be destitute of feeling if I was n…  1817 Monroe    James    
##  9 "Fellow citizens, I shall not attempt to des…  1821 Monroe    James    
## 10 "In compliance with an usage coeval with the…  1825 Adams     John Qui…
## # ... with 48 more rows

This lets us work with tidy tools like unnest_tokens to analyze the text alongside the metadata.

inaug_words <- inaug_td %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, text) %>%
  anti_join(stop_words)

inaug_words

## # A tibble: 50,156 x 4
##     Year President  FirstName word           
##    <dbl> <chr>      <chr>     <chr>          
##  1  1789 Washington George    fellow         
##  2  1789 Washington George    citizens       
##  3  1789 Washington George    senate         
##  4  1789 Washington George    house          
##  5  1789 Washington George    representatives
##  6  1789 Washington George    vicissitudes   
##  7  1789 Washington George    incident       
##  8  1789 Washington George    life           
##  9  1789 Washington George    event          
## 10  1789 Washington George    filled         
## # ... with 50,146 more rows

We could then, for example, see how the appearance of a word changes over time:

inaug_freq <- inaug_words %>%
  count(Year, word) %>%
  ungroup() %>%
  complete(Year, word, fill = list(n = 0)) %>%
  group_by(Year) %>%
  mutate(year_total = sum(n),
         percent = n / year_total) %>%
  ungroup()

inaug_freq

## # A tibble: 501,990 x 5
##     Year word            n year_total percent
##    <dbl> <chr>       <dbl>      <dbl>   <dbl>
##  1  1789 1            0           529 0      
##  2  1789 1,000        0           529 0      
##  3  1789 100          0           529 0      
##  4  1789 100,000,000  0           529 0      
##  5  1789 120,000,000  0           529 0      
##  6  1789 125          0           529 0      
##  7  1789 13           0           529 0      
##  8  1789 14th         1.00        529 0.00189
##  9  1789 15th         0           529 0      
## 10  1789 16           0           529 0      
## # ... with 501,980 more rows

For example, we can use the broom package to perform logistic regression on each word.

models <- inaug_freq %>%
  group_by(word) %>%
  filter(sum(n) > 50) %>%
  do(tidy(glm(cbind(n, year_total - n) ~ Year, .,
              family = "binomial"))) %>%
  ungroup() %>%
  filter(term == "Year")

models

## # A tibble: 114 x 6
##    word           term  estimate std.error statistic               p.value
##    <chr>          <chr>    <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl>                 <dbl>
##  1 act            Year   0.00636   0.00215      2.96              3.10e⁻ ³
##  2 action         Year   0.00209   0.00190      1.10              2.71e⁻ ¹
##  3 administration Year  -0.00667   0.00184    - 3.63              2.84e⁻ ⁴
##  4 america        Year   0.0200    0.00154     13.0               2.02e⁻³⁸
##  5 american       Year   0.00818   0.00127      6.43              1.32e⁻¹⁰
##  6 americans      Year   0.0316    0.00346      9.14              6.22e⁻²⁰
##  7 authority      Year  -0.00585   0.00232    - 2.53              1.15e⁻ ²
##  8 business       Year   0.00332   0.00199      1.67              9.48e⁻ ²
##  9 called         Year  -0.00222   0.00207    - 1.07              2.83e⁻ ¹
## 10 century        Year   0.0155    0.00242      6.41              1.45e⁻¹⁰
## # ... with 104 more rows

models %>%
  filter(term == "Year") %>%
  arrange(desc(abs(estimate)))

## # A tibble: 114 x 6
##    word      term  estimate std.error statistic                    p.value
##    <chr>     <chr>    <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl>                      <dbl>
##  1 americans Year    0.0316  0.00346       9.14                   6.22e⁻²⁰
##  2 america   Year    0.0200  0.00154      13.0                    2.02e⁻³⁸
##  3 century   Year    0.0155  0.00242       6.41                   1.45e⁻¹⁰
##  4 live      Year    0.0140  0.00242       5.79                   6.92e⁻ ⁹
##  5 god       Year    0.0139  0.00187       7.45                   9.67e⁻¹⁴
##  6 democracy Year    0.0135  0.00233       5.78                   7.31e⁻ ⁹
##  7 earth     Year    0.0129  0.00223       5.81                   6.13e⁻ ⁹
##  8 freedom   Year    0.0128  0.00128       9.99                   1.66e⁻²³
##  9 powers    Year   -0.0123  0.00197     - 6.24                   4.32e⁻¹⁰
## 10 world     Year    0.0120  0.000974     12.3                    7.10e⁻³⁵
## # ... with 104 more rows

You can show these models as a volcano plot, which compares the effect size with the significance:

library(ggplot2)

models %>%
  mutate(adjusted.p.value = p.adjust(p.value)) %>%
  ggplot(aes(estimate, adjusted.p.value)) +
  geom_point() +
  scale_y_log10() +
  geom_text(aes(label = word), vjust = 1, hjust = 1,
            check_overlap = TRUE) +
  xlab("Estimated change over time") +
  ylab("Adjusted p-value")

We can also use the ggplot2 package to display the top 6 terms that have changed in frequency over time.

library(scales)

models %>%
  top_n(6, abs(estimate)) %>%
  inner_join(inaug_freq) %>%
  ggplot(aes(Year, percent)) +
  geom_point() +
  geom_smooth() +
  facet_wrap(~ word) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = percent_format()) +
  ylab("Frequency of word in speech")