efficient Term Document Matrix with NLTK

I am trying to create a term document matrix with NLTK and pandas. I wrote the following function:

def fnDTM_Corpus(xCorpus):
    import pandas as pd
    '''to create a Term Document Matrix from a NLTK Corpus'''
    fd_list = []
    for x in range(0, len(xCorpus.fileids())):
        fd_list.append(nltk.FreqDist(xCorpus.words(xCorpus.fileids()[x])))
    DTM = pd.DataFrame(fd_list, index = xCorpus.fileids())
    DTM.fillna(0,inplace = True)
    return DTM.T

to run it

import nltk
from nltk.corpus import PlaintextCorpusReader
corpus_root = 'C:/Data/'

newcorpus = PlaintextCorpusReader(corpus_root, '.*')

x = fnDTM_Corpus(newcorpus)

It works well for few small files in the corpus but gives me a MemoryError when I try to run it with a corpus of 4,000 files (of about 2 kb each).

Am I missing something?

I am using a 32 bit python. (am on windows 7, 64-bit OS, Core Quad CPU, 8 GB RAM). Do I really need to use 64 bit for corpus of this size ?

Solution

Thanks to Radim and Larsmans. My objective was to have a DTM like the one you get in R tm. I decided to use scikit-learn and partly inspired by this blog entry. This the code I came up with.

I post it here in the hope that someone else will find it useful.

import pandas as pd
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer 

def fn_tdm_df(docs, xColNames = None, **kwargs):
    ''' create a term document matrix as pandas DataFrame
    with **kwargs you can pass arguments of CountVectorizer
    if xColNames is given the dataframe gets columns Names'''

    #initialize the  vectorizer
    vectorizer = CountVectorizer(**kwargs)
    x1 = vectorizer.fit_transform(docs)
    #create dataFrame
    df = pd.DataFrame(x1.toarray().transpose(), index = vectorizer.get_feature_names())
    if xColNames is not None:
        df.columns = xColNames

    return df

to use it on a list of text in a directory

DIR = 'C:/Data/'

def fn_CorpusFromDIR(xDIR):
    ''' functions to create corpus from a Directories
    Input: Directory
    Output: A dictionary with 
             Names of files ['ColNames']
             the text in corpus ['docs']'''
    import os
    Res = dict(docs = [open(os.path.join(xDIR,f)).read() for f in os.listdir(xDIR)],
               ColNames = map(lambda x: 'P_' + x[0:6], os.listdir(xDIR)))
    return Res

to create the dataframe

d1 = fn_tdm_df(docs = fn_CorpusFromDIR(DIR)['docs'],
          xColNames = fn_CorpusFromDIR(DIR)['ColNames'], 
          stop_words=None, charset_error = 'replace')