list - Count Words in Python

Question

I have a list of strings in python.

list = [ "Sentence1. Sentence2...", "Sentence1. Sentence2...",...]

I want to remove stop words and count occurrence of each word of all different strings combined. Is there a simple way to do it?

I am currently thinking of using CountVectorizer() from scikit and than iterating for each word and combining the results

Answer 1

If you don't mind installing a new python library, I suggest you use gensim. The first tutorial does exactly what you ask:

# remove common words and tokenize
stoplist = set('for a of the and to in'.split())
texts = [[word for word in document.lower().split() if word not in stoplist]
         for document in documents]

You will then need to create the dictionary for your corpus of document and create the bag-of-words.

dictionary = corpora.Dictionary(texts)
dictionary.save('/tmp/deerwester.dict') # store the dictionary, for future 
print(dictionary)

You can weight the result using tf-idf and stuff and do LDA quite easily after.

Have a look at the tutorial 1 here