This post shows an example on text mining of Twitter data with R packages twitteR, tm and wordcloud. Package twitteR provides access to Twitter data, tm provides functions for text mining, and wordcloud visualizes the result with a word cloud.

Retrieving Text from Twitter

Packages:

• twitteR: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/r-old-release/. It depends on the RCurl package below.
• RCurl: http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/bin/windows/contrib/2.14/

> library(twitteR)
> # retrieve the first 100 tweets (or all tweets if fewer than 100)
> # from the user timeline of @rdatammining
> rdmTweets <- userTimeline(“rdatamining”, n=100)
> n <- length(rdmTweets)
> rdmTweets[1:5]
[[1]]
Text Mining Tutorial http://t.co/jPHHLEGm
[[2]]
R cookbook with examples http://t.co/aVtIaSEg
[[3]]
Access large amounts of Twitter data for data mining and other tasks within
R via the twitteR package. http://t.co/ApbAbnxs

Transforming Text

The tweets are first converted to a data frame and then to a corpus.
> df <- do.call(“rbind”, lapply(rdmTweets, as.data.frame))
> dim(df)
[1] 79 10

> library(tm)
> # build a corpus, which is a collection of text documents
> # VectorSource specifies that the source is character vectors.
> myCorpus <- Corpus(VectorSource(df$text))

After that, the corpus needs a couple of transformations, including changing letters to lower case, removing punctuations/numbers and removing stop words. The general English stop-word list is tailored by adding “available” and “via” and removing “r”.
> myCorpus <- tm_map(myCorpus, tolower)
> # remove punctuation
> myCorpus <- tm_map(myCorpus, removePunctuation)
> # remove numbers
> myCorpus <- tm_map(myCorpus, removeNumbers)
> # remove stopwords
> myStopwords <- c(stopwords(‘english’), “available”, “via”)
> idx <- which(myStopwords == “r”)
> # keep “r” by removing it from stopwords
> myStopwords <- myStopwords[-idx]
> myCorpus <- tm_map(myCorpus, removeWords, myStopwords)

Stemming Words

In many cases, words need to be stemmed to retrieve their radicals. For instance, “example” and “examples” are both stemmed to “exampl”. However, after that, one may want to complete the stems to their original forms, so that the words would look “normal”.

> dictCorpus <- myCorpus
> # stem words in a text document with the snowball stemmers,
> # which requires packages Snowball, RWeka, rJava, RWekajars
> myCorpus <- tm_map(myCorpus, stemDocument)
> # inspect the first three “document”
> inspect(myCorpus[1:3])
(Some detailed info are removed to make it short. Same applies to inspect() below.)
[[1]]
text mine tutori httptcojphhlegm
[[2]]
r cookbook exampl httptcoavtiaseg
[[3]]
access amount twitter data data mine task r twitter packag httptcoapbabnx

> # stem completion
> myCorpus <- tm_map(myCorpus, stemCompletion, dictionary=dictCorpus)

Print the first three documents in the built corpus.
> inspect(myCorpus[1:3])
[[1]]
text miners tutorial httptcojphhlegm
[[2]]
r cookbook examples httptcoavtiaseg
[[3]]
access amounts twitter data data miners task r twitter package httptcoapbabnxs

Something unexpected in the above stemming and stem completion is that, word “mining” is first stemmed to “mine”, and then is completed to “miners”, instead of “mining”, although there are many instances of “mining” in the tweets, compared to only one instance of “miners”.

Building a Document-Term Matrix

> myDtm <- TermDocumentMatrix(myCorpus, control = list(minWordLength = 1))
> inspect(myDtm[266:270,31:40])
A term-document matrix (5 terms, 10 documents)
Non-/sparse entries: 9/41
Sparsity : 82%
Maximal term length: 12
Weighting : term frequency (tf)
Docs
Terms             31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
r                         0   0   1    1   1   0   1   2   1   0
ramachandran 0   0   0   0   0   0   1   0   0  0
ranked              0   0   0    1   0   0  0   0   0  0
rapidminer       0   0   0   0   0   0  0   0   0  0
rdatamining     0   0   1    0   0   0  0   0   0  0

Based on the above matrix, many data mining tasks can be done, for example, clustering, classification and association analysis.

Frequent Terms and Associations

> findFreqTerms(myDtm, lowfreq=10)
[1] “analysis” “data” “examples” “miners” “package” “r” “slides”
[8] “tutorial” “users”

> # which words are associated with “r”?
> findAssocs(myDtm, ‘r’, 0.30)
r         users   examples package canberra cran  list
1.00   0.44     0.34         0.31        0.30        0.30 0.30

> # which words are associated with “mining”?
> # Here “miners” is used instead of “mining”,
> # because the latter is stemmed and then completed to “miners”.
> findAssocs(myDtm, ‘miners’, 0.30)
miners data classification httptcogbnpv mahout
1.00     0.56           0.47         0.47             0.47
recommendation sets   supports frequent itemset
0.47                      0.47     0.47          0.40     0.39

Word Cloud

After building a document-term matrix, we can show the importance of words with a word cloud (also kown as a tag cloud) . In the code below, word “miners” are changed back to “mining”.
> library(wordcloud)
> m <- as.matrix(myDtm)
> # calculate the frequency of words
> v <- sort(rowSums(m), decreasing=TRUE)
> myNames <- names(v)
> k <- which(names(v)==”miners”)
> myNames[k] <- “mining”
> d <- data.frame(word=myNames, freq=v)
> wordcloud(d$word, d$freq, min.freq=3)

The above word cloud clearly shows that “r”, “data” and “mining” are the three most important words, which validates that the @RDataMining tweets present information on R and data mining. The other important words are “analysis”, “examples”, “slides”, “tutorial” and “package”, which shows that it focuses on documents and examples on analysis and R packages.

More examples on data mining with R are available at RDataMining website, and also at my Twitter and groups below.
Twitter: http://twitter.com/RDataMining
Group on Linkedin: http://group2.rdatamining.com
Group on Google: http://group.rdatamining.com