- NLP: Stop Words, When and Why to Use Them
- Why Do We Remove Stopwords?
- Which NLP Techniques or Applications Should Remove Stop Words?
- Which NLP Techniques of Applications Should Keep Stop Words?
- List of Default English Stop Words from Different Libraries
- List of all 326 Default Stopwords in spaCy
- List of all 179 Default Stopwords in NLTK
- Stopwords Recap
- Further Reading
- NLTK stop words
- Natural Language Processing: remove stop words
- NLTK Stopword List
- Filter stop words nltk
NLP: Stop Words, When and Why to Use Them
There are 326 “Stop Words” by default in spaCy. What are stopwords (or stop words)? They’re common words that we don’t want to include in some of our analysis when we perform Natural Language Processing. These are words that generally don’t contribute anything to the meaning of the text. However, we can’t always remove stopwords. In this article we’re going to go over why we remove stopwords, which NLP techniques and applications should keep or remove stopwords, and lists of default stop words for spaCy and NLTK.
Why Do We Remove Stopwords?
Stopwords are words that don’t add to the overall meaning of our text. When performing NLP tasks that revolve around understanding, we don’t need these words. Since machine learning is computationally expensive, it benefits us to process as little data as possible while still being able to produce a usable result. Of course, we can’t remove stop words for every task, so let’s take a look at which tasks we should remove stopwords for and which tasks we should keep them for.
Which NLP Techniques or Applications Should Remove Stop Words?
As we talked about above, not all Natural Language Processing tasks require removing stop words. The NLP techniques or applications that should use stopword removal in the pipeline are ones that revolve around meaning. These are usually the Natural Language Understanding tasks. These include applications like sentiment analysis, semantic parsing, or spam filtering. The tasks that don’t require stop words are ones which don’t necessarily need these common words to construct their responses.
Which NLP Techniques of Applications Should Keep Stop Words?
So, if we want to remove stopwords for NLP techniques and applications that don’t require them in their responses, which ones should keep stop words? When we’re doing NLP tasks that require the whole text in its processing, we should keep stopwords. Examples of these kinds of NLP tasks include text summarization, language translation, and when doing question-answer tasks. You can see that these tasks depend on some common words such as “for”, “on”, or “in” to model the connection between words.
List of Default English Stop Words from Different Libraries
In our introduction to the top 3 NLP libraries in Python, we went over spaCy, NLTK, and CoreNLP. Interestingly, there’s no universal list of stopwords. The spaCy library has 326 default stopwords in English, the NLTK library has 179, and CoreNLP doesn’t have its own list of default stopwords. Let’s take a look at the default stopwords from spaCy and NLTK and how to get them.
List of all 326 Default Stopwords in spaCy
There are 326 default stopwords in spaCy. To get these, we install the `spacy` library and download the `en_core_web_sm` model. The default stop words come with the model. We can see the stopwords by loading the model and printing it’s `Defaults.stop_words`.
pip install spacy python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm
import spacy nlp = spacy.load(“en_core_web_sm”) print(nlp.Defaults.stop_words)
'you', 'something', 'anyhow', 'would', 'not', 'first', 'now', 'without', 'which', 'may', 'regarding', '’d', 'back', 'nevertheless', 'how', 'should', 'bottom', 'by', 'twelve', 'least', 'but', '‘d', 'thence', 'i', 'hers', 'are', 'therein', 'same', 'indeed', 'others', 'whither', 'your', '’ll', 'either', 'last', 'therefore', 'do', 'whence', 'we', 'top', 'beforehand', 'though', 'across', 'everyone', 'only', 'full', 'fifteen', 'hereby', 'since', 'while', 're', 'beside', 'quite', 'her', 'is', 'their', 'meanwhile', 'neither', 'various', 'everywhere', "'d", 'made', 'nowhere', 'name', 'of', 'done', 'ever', 'onto', 'off', 'its', 'most', 'twenty', 'next', 'after', 'does', 'whether', 'say', 'please', 'at', 'sometimes', "n't", 'hereafter', 'here', 'until', 'itself', 'latterly', 'well', 'became', 'under', 'behind', 'the', 'me', 'must', 'give', 'former', 'using', 'or', 'otherwise', 'noone', '‘s', 'yours', 'everything', 'wherein', 'even', 'take', 'put', 'ourselves', 'themselves', 'him', 'beyond', 'whose', 'another', 'with', 'every', 'whom', 'somewhere', 'forty', 'via', '’ve', 'get', "'s", '‘re', 'any', 'due', 'really', '’re', 'towards', 'it', 'whereupon', 'none', 'anyway', 'very', 'among', 'before', 'sixty', 'eleven', 'seeming', 'why', 'whereby', 'whenever', 'per', 'ours', 'namely', 'they', "'m", 'along', 'somehow', 'yourself', 'many', 'empty', 'who', 'becoming', 'hence', 'them', 'n’t', 'between', 'a', 'be', 'further', 'against', 'else', 'when', 'has', 'will', 'anyone', 'was', 'several', 'there', 'three', 'formerly', 'one', 'my', 'were', 'side', 'cannot', 'becomes', "'ll", 'make', 'such', 'never', 'amount', 'enough', 'just', 'our', 'those', 'besides', '’s', 'being', 'part', 'except', 'someone', 'often', 'seems', '‘ve', 'latter', "'ve", 'afterwards', 'both', 'during', 'unless', 'together', 'n‘t', 'show', 'keep', 'too', 'each', 'into', 'been', 'an', 'us', 'whereafter', 'to', 'in', 'nor', '‘ll', 'so', "'re", 'down', 'six', 'toward', 'five', 'doing', 'out', 'herein', 'thereupon', 'whole', 'anything', 'can', 'because', 'over', 'however', 'seem', 'serious', 'go', 'am', 'then', 'myself', 'within', 'four', 'his', 'nobody', 'sometime', 'yet', 'front', 'become', 'himself', 'wherever', 'upon', 'nothing', 'few', 'hundred', 'move', '‘m', 'what', 'as', 'below', 'elsewhere', 'mostly', 'anywhere', 'up', 'that', 'amongst', 'this', 'around', 'she', 'always', 'thereafter', 'nine', 'ca', 'already', 'herself', 'some', 'much', 'if', 'two', 'these', 'had', 'ten', 'whatever', 'also', 'through', 'thus', 'yourselves', 'see', 'he', 'throughout', 'for', 'moreover', '’m', 'seemed', 'again', 'might', 'all', 'on', 'almost', 'have', 'less', 'fifty', 'eight', 'could', 'used', 'thereby', 'perhaps', 'above', 'whereas', 'and', 'about', 'although', 'still', 'mine', 'from', 'than', 'rather', 'once', 'third', 'call', 'alone', 'did', 'more', 'thru', 'whoever', 'where', 'hereupon', 'other', 'own', 'no'
List of all 179 Default Stopwords in NLTK
There are 179 stop words in NLTK. To get all the default stopwords from NLTK, we install the library and download the `stopwords` submodule. Once we do that, we can see all the stopwords with a simple command.
pip install nltk python >>> nltk.download(“stopwords”)
from nltk.corpus import stopwords print(stopwords.words('english'))
'i', 'me', 'my', 'myself', 'we', 'our', 'ours', 'ourselves', 'you', "you're", "you've", "you'll", "you'd", 'your', 'yours', 'yourself', 'yourselves', 'he', 'him', 'his', 'himself', 'she', "she's", 'her', 'hers', 'herself', 'it', "it's", 'its', 'itself', 'they', 'them', 'their', 'theirs', 'themselves', 'what', 'which', 'who', 'whom', 'this', 'that', "that'll", 'these', 'those', 'am', 'is', 'are', 'was', 'were', 'be', 'been', 'being', 'have', 'has', 'had', 'having', 'do', 'does', 'did', 'doing', 'a', 'an', 'the', 'and', 'but', 'if', 'or', 'because', 'as', 'until', 'while', 'of', 'at', 'by', 'for', 'with', 'about', 'against', 'between', 'into', 'through', 'during', 'before', 'after', 'above', 'below', 'to', 'from', 'up', 'down', 'in', 'out', 'on', 'off', 'over', 'under', 'again', 'further', 'then', 'once', 'here', 'there', 'when', 'where', 'why', 'how', 'all', 'any', 'both', 'each', 'few', 'more', 'most', 'other', 'some', 'such', 'no', 'nor', 'not', 'only', 'own', 'same', 'so', 'than', 'too', 'very', 's', 't', 'can', 'will', 'just', 'don', "don't", 'should', "should've", 'now', 'd', 'll', 'm', 'o', 're', 've', 'y', 'ain', 'aren', "aren't", 'couldn', "couldn't", 'didn', "didn't", 'doesn', "doesn't", 'hadn', "hadn't", 'hasn', "hasn't", 'haven', "haven't", 'isn', "isn't", 'ma', 'mightn', "mightn't", 'mustn', "mustn't", 'needn', "needn't", 'shan', "shan't", 'shouldn', "shouldn't", 'wasn', "wasn't", 'weren', "weren't", 'won', "won't", 'wouldn', "wouldn't"
Stopwords Recap
In this post, we learned that stopwords are the most common words in a language that usually don’t provide much semantic value. Then we looked at why we remove stopwords. Some NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis should remove stop words. Some NLP tasks such as AI Summarization, shouldn’t remove stop words. Finally, we went over the default stopwords in spaCy and NLTK and how to get them.
Further Reading
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NLTK stop words
Natural Language Processing with Python Natural language processing (nlp) is a research field that presents many challenges such as natural language understanding.
Stop words are common words like ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘I’, etc. that are very frequent in text, and so don’t convey insights into the specific topic of a document. We can remove these stop words from the text in a given corpus to clean up the data, and identify words that are more rare and potentially more relevant to what we’re interested in.
Text may contain stop words like ‘the’, ‘is’, ‘are’. Stop words can be filtered from the text to be processed. There is no universal list of stop words in nlp research, however the nltk module contains a list of stop words.
In this article you will learn how to remove stop words with the nltk module.
Related course
Natural Language Processing: remove stop words
The stopwords are a list of words that are very very common but don’t provide useful information for most text analysis procedures.
While it is helpful for understand the structure of sentences, it does not help you understand the semantics of the sentences themselves. Here’s a list of most commonly used words in English:
N = [ ‘stop’, ‘the’, ‘to’, ‘and’, ‘a’, ‘in’, ‘it’, ‘is’, ‘I’, ‘that’, ‘had’, ‘on’, ‘for’, ‘were’, ‘was’]
With nltk you don’t have to define every stop word manually. Stop words are frequently used words that carry very little meaning. Stop words are words that are so common they are basically ignored by typical tokenizers.
By default, NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) includes a list of 40 stop words, including: “a”, “an”, “the”, “of”, “in”, etc.
The stopwords in nltk are the most common words in data. They are words that you do not want to use to describe the topic of your content. They are pre-defined and cannot be removed.
from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize, word_tokenize
data = «All work and no play makes jack dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy.»
words = word_tokenize(data)
print(words)
Getting rid of stop words makes a lot of sense for any Natural Language Processing task. In this code you will see how you can get rid of these ugly stop words from your texts.
First let’s import a few packages that we will need:
from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize, word_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
The last one is key here, it contains all the stop words.
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
This is a list of lexical stop words in English. That is, these words are ignored during most natural language processing tasks, such as part-of-speech tagging, tokenization and parsing.
NLTK Stopword List
So stopwords are words that are very common in human language but are generally not useful because they represent particularly common words such as “the”, “of”, and “to”.
If you get the error NLTK stop words not found, make sure to download the stop words after installing nltk.
>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download(‘stopwords’)
You can view the list of included stop words in NLTK using the code below:
import nltk
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
stops = set(stopwords.words(‘english’))
print(stops)
You can do that for different languages, so you can configure for the language you need.
stops = set(stopwords.words(‘german’))
stops = set(stopwords.words(‘indonesia’))
stops = set(stopwords.words(‘portuguese’))
stops = set(stopwords.words(‘spanish’))
Filter stop words nltk
We will use a string (data) as text. Of course you can also do this with a text file as input. If you want to use a text file instead, you can do this:
text = open(«shakespeare.txt»).read().lower()
The program below filters stop words from the data.
from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize, word_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
data = «All work and no play makes jack dull boy. All work and no play makes jack a dull boy.»
stopWords = set(stopwords.words(‘english’))
words = word_tokenize(data)
wordsFiltered = []
for w in words:
if w not in stopWords:
wordsFiltered.append(w)
print(wordsFiltered)
A module has been imported:
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
We get a set of English stop words using the line:
stopWords = set(stopwords.words(‘english’))
The returned list stopWords contains 153 stop words on my computer.
You can view the length or contents of this array with the lines:
print(len(stopWords))
print(stopWords)
We create a new list called wordsFiltered which contains all words which are not stop words.
To create it we iterate over the list of words and only add it if its not in the stopWords list.
for w in words:
if w not in stopWords:
wordsFiltered.append(w)