2.1.0
User Documentation for Apache MADlib
Term Frequency

Term frequency computes the number of times that a word or term occurs in a document. Term frequency is often used as part of a larger text processing pipeline, which may include operations such as stemming, stop word removal and topic modelling.

Function Syntax
    term_frequency(input_table,
                   doc_id_col,
                   word_col,
                   output_table,
                   compute_vocab)

Arguments:

input_table

TEXT. The name of the table containing the documents, with one document per row. Each row is in the form <doc_id, word_vector> where doc_id is an id unique to each document, and word_vector is a text array containing the words in the document. The word_vector should contain multiple entries of a word if the document contains multiple occurrence of that word.

doc_id_col

TEXT. The name of the column containing the document id.

word_col

TEXT. The name of the column containing the vector of words/terms in the document. This column should be of type that can be cast to TEXT[].

output_table

TEXT. The name of the table to store the term frequency output. The output table contains the following columns:

  • doc_id_col: This the document id column (name will be same as the one provided as input).
  • word: Word/term present in a document. Depending on the value of compute_vocab below, this is either the original word as it appears in word_col, or an id representing the word. Note that word id's start from 0 not 1.
  • count: The number of times this word is found in the document.

compute_vocab
BOOLEAN. (Optional, Default=FALSE) Flag to indicate if a vocabulary table is to be created. If TRUE, an additional output table is created containing the vocabulary of all words, with an id assigned to each word in alphabetical order. The table is called output_table_vocabulary (i.e., suffix added to the output_table name) and contains the following columns:
  • wordid: An id for each word in alphabetical order.
  • word: The word/term corresponding to the id.

Examples
  1. First we create a document table with one document per row:
    DROP TABLE IF EXISTS documents;
    CREATE TABLE documents(docid INT4, contents TEXT);
    INSERT INTO documents VALUES
    (0, 'I like to eat broccoli and bananas. I ate a banana and spinach smoothie for breakfast.'),
    (1, 'Chinchillas and kittens are cute.'),
    (2, 'My sister adopted two kittens yesterday.'),
    (3, 'Look at this cute hamster munching on a piece of broccoli.');
    
    You can apply stemming, stop word removal and tokenization at this point in order to prepare the documents for text processing. Depending upon your database version, various tools are available. Databases based on more recent versions of PostgreSQL may do something like:
    SELECT tsvector_to_array(to_tsvector('english',contents)) from documents;
    
                        tsvector_to_array
    +----------------------------------------------------------
     {ate,banana,breakfast,broccoli,eat,like,smoothi,spinach}
     {chinchilla,cute,kitten}
     {adopt,kitten,sister,two,yesterday}
     {broccoli,cute,hamster,look,munch,piec}
    (4 rows)
    
    In this example, we assume a database based on an older version of PostgreSQL and just perform basic punctuation removal and tokenization. The array of words is added as a new column to the documents table:
    ALTER TABLE documents ADD COLUMN words TEXT[];
    UPDATE documents SET words =
        regexp_split_to_array(lower(
        regexp_replace(contents, E'[,.;\']','', 'g')
        ), E'[\\s+]');
    \x on
    SELECT * FROM documents ORDER BY docid;
    
    -[ RECORD 1 ]------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    docid    | 0
    contents | I like to eat broccoli and bananas. I ate a banana and spinach smoothie for breakfast.
    words    | {i,like,to,eat,broccoli,and,bananas,i,ate,a,banana,and,spinach,smoothie,for,breakfast}
    -[ RECORD 2 ]------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    docid    | 1
    contents | Chinchillas and kittens are cute.
    words    | {chinchillas,and,kittens,are,cute}
    -[ RECORD 3 ]------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    docid    | 2
    contents | My sister adopted two kittens yesterday.
    words    | {my,sister,adopted,two,kittens,yesterday}
    -[ RECORD 4 ]------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    docid    | 3
    contents | Look at this cute hamster munching on a piece of broccoli.
    words    | {look,at,this,cute,hamster,munching,on,a,piece,of,broccoli}
    
  2. Compute the frequency of each word in each document:
    DROP TABLE IF EXISTS documents_tf, documents_tf_vocabulary;
    SELECT madlib.term_frequency('documents',    -- input table
                                 'docid',        -- document id column
                                 'words',        -- vector of words in document
                                 'documents_tf'  -- output table
                                );
    \x off
    SELECT * FROM documents_tf ORDER BY docid;
    
     docid |    word     | count
    -------+-------------+-------
         0 | a           |     1
         0 | breakfast   |     1
         0 | banana      |     1
         0 | and         |     2
         0 | eat         |     1
         0 | smoothie    |     1
         0 | to          |     1
         0 | like        |     1
         0 | broccoli    |     1
         0 | bananas     |     1
         0 | spinach     |     1
         0 | i           |     2
         0 | ate         |     1
         0 | for         |     1
         1 | are         |     1
         1 | cute        |     1
         1 | kittens     |     1
         1 | chinchillas |     1
         1 | and         |     1
         2 | two         |     1
         2 | yesterday   |     1
         2 | kittens     |     1
         2 | sister      |     1
         2 | my          |     1
         2 | adopted     |     1
         3 | this        |     1
         3 | at          |     1
         3 | a           |     1
         3 | broccoli    |     1
         3 | of          |     1
         3 | look        |     1
         3 | hamster     |     1
         3 | on          |     1
         3 | piece       |     1
         3 | cute        |     1
         3 | munching    |     1
    (36 rows)
    
  3. Next we create a vocabulary of the words and store a wordid in the output table instead of the actual word:
    DROP TABLE IF EXISTS documents_tf, documents_tf_vocabulary;
    SELECT madlib.term_frequency('documents',    -- input table
                                 'docid',        -- document id column
                                 'words',        -- vector of words in document
                                 'documents_tf',-- output table
                                 TRUE
                                );
    SELECT * FROM documents_tf ORDER BY docid;
    
     docid | wordid | count
    -------+--------+-------
         0 |     17 |     1
         0 |      9 |     1
         0 |     25 |     1
         0 |     12 |     1
         0 |     13 |     1
         0 |     15 |     2
         0 |      0 |     1
         0 |      2 |     2
         0 |     28 |     1
         0 |      5 |     1
         0 |      6 |     1
         0 |      7 |     1
         0 |      8 |     1
         0 |     26 |     1
         1 |     16 |     1
         1 |     11 |     1
         1 |     10 |     1
         1 |      2 |     1
         1 |      3 |     1
         2 |     30 |     1
         2 |      1 |     1
         2 |     16 |     1
         2 |     20 |     1
         2 |     24 |     1
         2 |     29 |     1
         3 |      4 |     1
         3 |     21 |     1
         3 |     22 |     1
         3 |     23 |     1
         3 |      0 |     1
         3 |     11 |     1
         3 |      9 |     1
         3 |     27 |     1
         3 |     14 |     1
         3 |     18 |     1
         3 |     19 |     1
    (36 rows)
    
    Note above that wordid's start at 0 not 1. The vocabulary table maps wordid to the actual word:
    SELECT * FROM documents_tf_vocabulary ORDER BY wordid;
    
     wordid |    word
    --------+-------------
          0 | a
          1 | adopted
          2 | and
          3 | are
          4 | at
          5 | ate
          6 | banana
          7 | bananas
          8 | breakfast
          9 | broccoli
         10 | chinchillas
         11 | cute
         12 | eat
         13 | for
         14 | hamster
         15 | i
         16 | kittens
         17 | like
         18 | look
         19 | munching
         20 | my
         21 | of
         22 | on
         23 | piece
         24 | sister
         25 | smoothie
         26 | spinach
         27 | this
         28 | to
         29 | two
         30 | yesterday
    (31 rows)
    

Related Topics

See text_utilities.sql_in for the term frequency SQL function definition and porter_stemmer.sql_in for the stemmer function.