require(quanteda)
require(quanteda.textstats)
require(quanteda.corpora)
This corpus contains 6,000 Guardian news articles from 2012 to 2016.
corp_news <- download("data_corpus_guardian")
A collocation analysis allows us to identify contiguous collocations of words. One of the most common types of multi-word expressions are proper names, which can be identified simply based on capitalization in English texts.
toks_news <- tokens(corp_news, remove_punct = TRUE)
tstat_col_caps <- tokens_select(toks_news, pattern = "^[A-Z]",
valuetype = "regex",
case_insensitive = FALSE,
padding = TRUE) %>%
textstat_collocations(min_count = 100)
head(tstat_col_caps, 20)
## collocation count count_nested length lambda z
## 1 david cameron 861 0 2 8.160098 147.29289
## 2 donald trump 774 0 2 8.327716 122.70693
## 3 george osborne 364 0 2 8.661545 107.63031
## 4 hillary clinton 527 0 2 9.107464 102.40567
## 5 new york 1016 0 2 10.448615 100.27377
## 6 islamic state 330 0 2 9.802948 98.15309
## 7 white house 479 0 2 9.922733 96.18333
## 8 european union 351 0 2 8.262324 94.77068
## 9 jeremy corbyn 244 0 2 8.730294 90.80217
## 10 boris johnson 245 0 2 9.664926 84.77459
## 11 bernie sanders 394 0 2 9.902167 84.62422
## 12 guardian australia 237 0 2 6.330225 83.71292
## 13 northern ireland 205 0 2 9.883953 83.26403
## 14 home office 216 0 2 9.691271 78.67675
## 15 ed miliband 174 0 2 9.868828 78.45452
## 16 ted cruz 417 0 2 10.757134 77.88400
## 17 barack obama 344 0 2 9.776070 77.73324
## 18 south africa 172 0 2 7.569419 77.61996
## 19 south carolina 271 0 2 9.405522 76.80761
## 20 black friday 190 0 2 8.459759 76.80634
You can also discover collocations longer than two words. In the example below we identify collocations consisting of three words.
tstat_col2 <- tokens_select(toks_news, pattern = "^[A-Z]",
valuetype = "regex",
case_insensitive = FALSE,
padding = TRUE) %>%
textstat_collocations(min_count = 100, size = 3)
head(tstat_col2, 20)
## collocation count count_nested length lambda z
## 1 international monetary fund 101 0 3 2.2418609 1.0788125
## 2 new york times 128 0 3 -0.5079552 -0.3343106
If you find textstat_collocations() is taking too much time, increase the min_count threshold to speed up the estimation. You also do not need to set sizes larger than 2 to compound multi-word expressions, because overlapped collocations are chained if join = TRUE in tokens_compound().