What algorithm I need to find n-grams?

Question

What algorithm is used for finding ngrams?

Supposing my input data is an array of words and the size of the ngrams I want to find, what algorithm I should use?

Answer 1

You can use ngram package. One example of its usage is http://amunategui.github.io/speak-like-a-doctor/

Answer 2

For anyone still interested in this topic, there is a package on the cran already.

ngram: An n-gram Babbler

This package offers utilities for creating, displaying, and "babbling" n-grams. The babbler is a simple Markov process.

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ngram/index.html

Answer 3

Simple heres the java answer:

int ngrams = 9;// let's say 9-grams since it's the length of "bonasuera"... 
String string = "bonasuera";
for (int j=1; j <= ngrams;j++) {    
    for (int k=0; k < string.length()-j+1;k++ )
        System.out.print(string.substring(k,k+j) + " ");
    System.out.println();
}

output :

b o n a s u e r a 
bo on na as su ue er ra 
bon ona nas asu sue uer era 
bona onas nasu asue suer uera 
bonas onasu nasue asuer suera 
bonasu onasue nasuer asuera 
bonasue onasuer nasuera 
bonasuer onasuera 
bonasuera 

Answer 4

EDIT: Sorry, this is PHP. I wasn't quite sure what you wanted. I don't know it in java but perhaps the following could be converted easily enough.

Well it depends on the size of the ngrams you want.

I've had quite a lot of success with single letters (especially accurate for language detection), which is easy to get with:

$letters=str_split(preg_replace('/[^a-z]/', '', strtolower($text)));
$letters=array_count_values($letters);

Then there is the following function for calculating ngrams from a word:

function getNgrams($word, $n = 3) {
        $ngrams = array();
        $len = strlen($word);
        for($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) {
                if($i > ($n - 2)) {
                        $ng = '';
                        for($j = $n-1; $j >= 0; $j--) {
                                $ng .= $word[$i-$j];
                        }
                        $ngrams[] = $ng;
                }
        }
        return $ngrams;
}

The source of the above is here, which I recommend you read, and they have lots of functions to do exactly what you want.

Answer 5

If you want to use R to identify ngrams, you can use the tm package and the RWeka package. It will tell you how many times the ngram occurs in your documents, like so:

  library("RWeka")
  library("tm")

  data("crude")

  BigramTokenizer <- function(x) NGramTokenizer(x, Weka_control(min = 2, max = 2))
  tdm <- TermDocumentMatrix(crude, control = list(tokenize = BigramTokenizer))

  inspect(tdm[340:345,1:10])

A term-document matrix (6 terms, 10 documents)

Non-/sparse entries: 4/56
Sparsity           : 93%
Maximal term length: 13 
Weighting          : term frequency (tf)

               Docs
Terms           127 144 191 194 211 236 237 242 246 248
  and said        0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
  and security    0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1   0
  and set         0   1   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
  and six-month   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1   0   0
  and some        0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0
  and stabilise   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   0   1

hat-tip: http://tm.r-forge.r-project.org/faq.html

Answer 6

Usually the n-grams are calculated to find its frequency distribution. So Yes, it does matter how many times the n-grams appear.

Also you want character level n-gram or word level n-gram. I have written a code for finding the character level n-gram from a csv file in r. I used package 'tau' for that. You can find it here.

Also here is the code I wrote:

 library(tau)
temp<-read.csv("/home/aravi/Documents/sample/csv/ex.csv",header=FALSE,stringsAsFactors=F)
r<-textcnt(temp, method="ngram",n=4L,split = "[[:space:][:punct:]]+", decreasing=TRUE)
a<-data.frame(counts = unclass(r), size = nchar(names(r)))
b<-split(a,a$size)
b

Cheers!