
PYTHON — Corpus Vocabulary Vectors in Python
Make it work, make it right, make it fast. — Kent Beck
Insights in this article were refined using prompt engineering methods.

PYTHON — Add Logic to Your Code Using Python
## Corpus, Vocabulary, and Feature Vectors
When working with natural language processing tasks, it is important to understand the concepts of a corpus, vocabulary, and feature vectors. In this tutorial, we will explore how to represent text data as numerical values in Python using the scikit-learn library.
Understanding the Terminology
Before we dive into the coding examples, let’s clarify some terminology:
- Corpus: A collection of texts is referred to as a corpus. It could be a collection of documents, sentences, or any other form of textual data.
- Vocabulary: When we drill down to the word level, the collection of unique words in the corpus is called the vocabulary. Each unique word is assigned a unique index that is used to identify the words during training.
- Feature Vectors: These are numerical representations of the sentences in the corpus. Each sentence is converted into a list of numbers using the indexes mapped in the vocabulary.
Converting Text to Feature Vectors
To demonstrate the conversion of a corpus into feature vectors, let’s consider an example using the CountVectorizer class from the sklearn.feature_extraction.text module.
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
# Define two example sentences
sentences = [
'John likes ice cream',
'Mary hates chocolate'
]
# Create a CountVectorizer object
vectorizer = CountVectorizer()
# Create the vocabulary from the sentences
vectorizer.fit(sentences)
# Get the vocabulary
vocabulary = vectorizer.vocabulary_
print(vocabulary)In this example, we define two sentences and create a CountVectorizer object. We then use the fit method to create the vocabulary from the sentences. The resulting vocabulary is a dictionary with the unique words as keys and the indexes as values.
Next, we convert the sentences into feature vectors using the transform method and display the vectors using the toarray method:
# Convert the sentences into feature vectors
feature_vectors = vectorizer.transform(sentences)
# Display the feature vectors
print(feature_vectors.toarray())The feature vectors are represented as a sparse matrix from the SciPy library. Each vector is the same length as the vocabulary, and for each word in the sentence, the index of the word is a 1 in the same index in the vector.
Understanding Sparse Matrix
The resulting feature vectors form what is called a bag-of-words model. This model represents the numerical features of the text data. It is important to note that a sparse matrix is a suitable choice when dealing with a large vocabulary, as it efficiently handles the large amount of unused values in the matrix.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we explored the process of converting a corpus into feature vectors using the CountVectorizer class from the scikit-learn library. Understanding these concepts is crucial when working with text data in machine learning and natural language processing tasks.
In the next steps, you can use these feature vectors to train machine learning models for text classification using libraries such as scikit-learn and Keras.







