Statistics, Department of

 

The R Journal

Date of this Version

12-2017

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (December 2017) 9(2); Editor: Roger Bivand

Comments

Copyright 2017, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 4.0

Abstract

Recent advances in natural language processing have produced libraries that extract low level features from a collection of raw texts. These features, known as annotations, are usually stored internally in hierarchical, tree-based data structures. This paper proposes a data model to represent annotations as a collection of normalized relational data tables optimized for exploratory data analysis and predictive modeling. The R package cleanNLP, which calls one of two state of the art NLP libraries (CoreNLP or spaCy), is presented as an implementation of this data model. It takes raw text as an input and returns a list of normalized tables. Specific annotations provided include tokenization, part of speech tagging, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, dependency parsing, coreference resolution, and word embeddings. The package currently supports input text in English, German, French, and Spanish.

Share

COinS