replacetext-miningrapidminer

Delete hyphen (special chars) while processing text in RapidMiner


I would like to delete all hyphens in the text document which I analyze in Rapidminer. For that I use operator "Process documents from files" to analyze large PDF-files. Each file contains a lot of hyphens which I would like to delete before I'll tokenize the text into pieces (non letters). I've used operator "Replace token". With it I can replace hyphens with other symbols, but I cannot replace them with nothing or empty string(" "). I've tried also to use my own customized dictionary of stopwords(non-letters, -). This operator does no work at all. I've saved my dictionary containing the chars and words I want to delete as a text file (each in the new line). Can anybody help on this issue?


Solution

  • You can use Replace Tokens with the following parameters.

    replace what ()[-]

    replace by $1

    It's a bit of a hack but it works because the first capturing group between the brackets will always be empty and the whole regular expression will match a single hyphen. The $1 is the result of the first capture group and it's always empty.

    Here's an example process that shows this working.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
    <process version="7.0.000">
      <context>
        <input/>
        <output/>
        <macros/>
      </context>
      <operator activated="true" class="process" compatibility="7.0.000" expanded="true" name="Process">
        <process expanded="true">
          <operator activated="true" class="text:create_document" compatibility="7.0.000" expanded="true" height="68" name="Create Document" width="90" x="246" y="187">
            <parameter key="text" value="some text &#10;with&#10;some-text-with-hyphens-in&#10;hyphens in&#10;"/>
          </operator>
          <operator activated="true" class="text:replace_tokens" compatibility="7.0.000" expanded="true" height="68" name="Replace Tokens" width="90" x="447" y="187">
            <list key="replace_dictionary">
              <parameter key="()[-]" value="$1"/>
            </list>
          </operator>
          <operator activated="true" class="text:process_documents" compatibility="7.0.000" expanded="true" height="103" name="Process Documents" width="90" x="648" y="187">
            <parameter key="vector_creation" value="Term Occurrences"/>
            <process expanded="true">
              <operator activated="true" class="text:tokenize" compatibility="7.0.000" expanded="true" height="68" name="Tokenize" width="90" x="179" y="85"/>
              <connect from_port="document" to_op="Tokenize" to_port="document"/>
              <connect from_op="Tokenize" from_port="document" to_port="document 1"/>
              <portSpacing port="source_document" spacing="0"/>
              <portSpacing port="sink_document 1" spacing="0"/>
              <portSpacing port="sink_document 2" spacing="0"/>
            </process>
          </operator>
          <connect from_op="Create Document" from_port="output" to_op="Replace Tokens" to_port="document"/>
          <connect from_op="Replace Tokens" from_port="document" to_op="Process Documents" to_port="documents 1"/>
          <connect from_op="Process Documents" from_port="example set" to_port="result 1"/>
          <portSpacing port="source_input 1" spacing="0"/>
          <portSpacing port="sink_result 1" spacing="0"/>
          <portSpacing port="sink_result 2" spacing="0"/>
        </process>
      </operator>
    </process>
    

    Hope that helps as a basis.