LSAfun (version 0.8.1)

neighbors: Find nearest neighbors

Description

Returns the n nearest words to a given word or sentence/document

Usage

neighbors(x,n,tvectors=tvectors)

Value

A named numeric vector. The neighbors are given as names of the vector, and their respective cosines to the input as vector entries.

Arguments

x

a character vector of length(x) = 1 or a numeric of length=ncol(tvectors) vector with same dimensionality as the semantic space

n

the number of neighbors to be computed

tvectors

the semantic space in which the computation is to be done (a numeric matrix where every row is a word vector)

Author

Fritz Guenther

Details

The format of x should be of the kind x <- "word1 word2 word3" instead of

x <- c("word1", "word2", "word3") if sentences/documents are used as input. This allows for simple copy&paste-inserting of text.

To import a document Document.txt to from a directory for comparisons, set your working directory to this directory using setwd(). Then use the following command lines:

fileName1 <- "Alice_in_Wonderland.txt"

x <- readChar(fileName1, file.info(fileName1)$size).

Since x can also be chosen to be any vector of the active LSA Space, this function can be combined with compose() to compute neighbors of complex expressions (see examples)

References

Landauer, T.K., & Dumais, S.T. (1997). A solution to Plato's problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of acquisition, induction and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211-240.

Dennis, S. (2007). How to use the LSA Web Site. In T. K. Landauer, D. S. McNamara, S. Dennis, & W. Kintsch (Eds.), Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis (pp. 35-56). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

http://wordvec.colorado.edu/

See Also

cosine, plot_neighbors, compose

Examples

data(wonderland)

neighbors("cheshire",n=20,tvectors=wonderland) 

neighbors(compose("mad","hatter",method="Add",tvectors=wonderland),
n=20,tvectors=wonderland)