Your guess is correct, you can use:

$array = ['this is', 'array array', 'an array', 'test array'];
$stop  = ['is', 'test'];

$array = array_filter($array, function($x) use ($stop)
{
   return !preg_match('/('.join(')|(', $stop).')/', $x);
});

-i.e. exclude all items with certain words in it by pattern using array_filter()

This will work with filtering because it will match by regex, i.e. from $stop we'll get regex (is)|(test)

A good idea will be to evaluate regex separately so do not evaluate it each time inside array_filter() iteration, like:

$array   = ['this is', 'array array', 'an array', 'test array'];
$stop    = ['is', 'test'];
$pattern = '/('.join(')|(', $stop).')/';

$array = array_filter($array, function($x) use ($pattern)
{
   return !preg_match($pattern, $x);
});

Important note#1: if your stop words may contain some special characters that will be treated in regex in special way, it's needed to use preg_quote() like:

$pattern = '/'.join('|', array_map(function($x)
{
   return '('.preg_quote($x, '/').')';
}, $stop)).'/';

$array = array_filter($array, function($x) use ($pattern)
{
   return !preg_match($pattern, $x);
});

Important note#2: If your array of stopwords is too long this may cause regex compilation fail because of it's length (too large). There are some tricks to overcome it, but if it's your case, you'd better to use strpos() instead:

$array = array_filter($array, function($x) use ($stop)
{
   foreach($stop as $word)
   {
      if(false!==strpos($x, $word))
      {
         return false;
      }
   }
   return true;
});