Stop words and stemmer in java

Question

I'm thinking of putting a stop words in my similarity program and then a stemmer (going for porters 1 or 2 depends on what easiest to implement)

I was wondering that since I read my text from files as whole lines and save them as a long string, so if I got two strings ex.

String one = "I decided buy something from the shop.";
String two = "Nevertheless I decidedly bought something from a shop.";

Now that I got those strings

Stemming: Can I just use the stemmer algoritmen directly on it, save it as a String and then continue working on the similarity like I did before implementing the stemmer in the program, like running one.stem(); kind of thing?

Stop word: How does this work out? O.o Do I just use; one.replaceall("I", ""); or is there some specific way to use for this proces? I want to keep working with the string and get a string before using the similarity algorithms on it to get the similarity. Wiki doesn't say a lot.

Hope you can help me out! Thanks.

Edit: It is for a school-related project where I'm writing a paper on similarity between different algorithms so I don't think I'm allowed to use lucene or other libraries that does the work for me. Plus I would like to try and understand how it works before I start using the libraries like Lucene and co. Hope it's not too much a bother ^^

Answer 1

If you're not implementing this for academic reasons you should consider using the Lucene library. In either case it might be good for reference. It has classes for tokenization, stop word filtering, stemming and similarity. Here's a quick example using Lucene 3.0 to remove stop words and stem an input string:

public static String removeStopWordsAndStem(String input) throws IOException {
    Set<String> stopWords = new HashSet<String>();
    stopWords.add("a");
    stopWords.add("I");
    stopWords.add("the");

    TokenStream tokenStream = new StandardTokenizer(
            Version.LUCENE_30, new StringReader(input));
    tokenStream = new StopFilter(true, tokenStream, stopWords);
    tokenStream = new PorterStemFilter(tokenStream);

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    TermAttribute termAttr = tokenStream.getAttribute(TermAttribute.class);
    while (tokenStream.incrementToken()) {
        if (sb.length() > 0) {
            sb.append(" ");
        }
        sb.append(termAttr.term());
    }
    return sb.toString();
}

Which if used on your strings like this:

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    String one = "I decided buy something from the shop.";
    String two = "Nevertheless I decidedly bought something from a shop.";
    System.out.println(removeStopWordsAndStem(one));
    System.out.println(removeStopWordsAndStem(two));
}

Yields this output:

decid bui someth from shop
Nevertheless decidedli bought someth from shop

Answer 2

Yes, you can wrap any stemmer so that you can write something like

String stemmedString = stemmer.stemAndRemoveStopwords(inputString, stopWordList);

Internally, your stemAndRemoveStopwords would

• place all stopWords in a Map for fast reference
• initialize an empty StringBuilder to holde the output string
• iterate over all words in the input string, and for each word
  • search for it in the stopWordList; if found, continue to top of loop
  • otherwise, stem it using your preferred stemmer, and add it to to the output string
• return the output string

Answer 3

You don't have to deal with the whole text. Just split it, apply your stopword filter and stemming algorithm, then build the string again using a StringBuilder:

StrinBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(text.length());
String[] words = text.split("\\s+");
for (String word : words) {
    if (stopwordFilter.check(word)) { // Apply stopword filter.
        word = stemmer.stem(word); // Apply stemming algorithm.
        builder.append(word);
    }
}
text = builder.toString();