select.dict {lingmatch}

Select Dictionaries

Description

Retrieve information and links to dictionaries (lexicons/word lists) available at osf.io/y6g5b.

Usage

select.dict(query = NULL, dir = getOption("lingmatch.dict.dir"),
  check.md5 = TRUE, mode = "wb")

Arguments

query

A character matching a dictionary name, or a set of keywords to search for in dictionary information.

dir

Path to a folder containing dictionaries, or where you want them to be saved. Will look in getOption('lingmatch.dict.dir') and '~/Dictionaries' by default.

check.md5

Logical; if TRUE (default), retrieves the MD5 checksum from OSF, and compares it with that calculated from the downloaded file to check its integrity.

mode

Passed to download.file when downloading files.

Value

A list with varying entries:

• info: The version of osf.io/kjqb8 stored internally; a data.frame with dictionary names as row names, and information about each dictionary in columns.
  Also described at osf.io/y6g5b/wiki/dict_variables, here short (corresponding to the file name [{short}.(csv|dic)] and wiki urls [https://osf.io/y6g5b/wiki/{short}]) is set as row names and removed:

  • name: Full name of the dictionary.

  • description: Description of the dictionary, relating to its purpose and development.

  • note: Notes about processing decisions that additionally alter the original.

  • constructor: How the dictionary was constructed:

    • algorithm: Terms were selected by some automated process, potentially learned from data or other resources.

    • crowd: Several individuals rated the terms, and in aggregate those ratings translate to categories and weights.

    • mixed: Some combination of the other methods, usually in some iterative process.

    • team: One of more individuals make decisions about term inclusions, categories, and weights.

  • subject: Broad, rough subject or purpose of the dictionary:

    • emotion: Terms relate to emotions, potentially exemplifying or expressing them.

    • general: A large range of categories, aiming to capture the content of the text.

    • impression: Terms are categorized and weighted based on the impression they might give.

    • language: Terms are categorized or weighted based on their linguistic features, such as part of speech, specificity, or area of use.

    • social: Terms relate to social phenomena, such as characteristics or concerns of social entities.

  • terms: Number of unique terms across categories.

  • term_type: Format of the terms:

    • glob: Include asterisks which denote inclusion of any characters until a word boundary.

    • glob+: Glob-style asterisks with regular expressions within terms.

    • ngram: Includes any number of words as a term, separated by spaces.

    • pattern: A string of characters, potentially within or between words, or spanning words.

    • regex: Regular expressions.

    • stem: Unigrams with common endings removed.

    • unigram: Complete single words.

  • weighted: Indicates whether weights are associated with terms. This determines the file type of the dictionary: dictionaries with weights are stored as .csv, and those without are stored as .dic files.

  • regex_characters: Logical indicating whether special regular expression characters are present in any term, which might need to be escaped if the terms are used in regular expressions. Glob-type terms allow complete parens (at least one open and one closed, indicating preceding or following words), and initial and terminal asterisks. For all other terms, [](){}*.^$+?\| are counted as regex characters. These could be escaped in R with gsub('([][)(}{*.^$+?\\|])', '\\\1', terms) if terms is a character vector, and in Python with (importing re) [re.sub(r'([][(){}*.^$+?\|])', r'\\1', term) for term in terms] if terms is a list.

  • categories: Category names in the order in which they appear in the dictionary file, separated by commas.

  • ncategories: Number of categories.

  • original_max: Maximum value of the original dictionary before standardization: original values / max(original values) * 100. Dictionaries with no weights are considered to have a max of 1.

  • osf: ID of the file on OSF, translating to the file's URL: https://osf.io/osf.

  • wiki: URL of the dictionary's wiki.

  • downloaded: Path to the file if downloaded, and '' otherwise.

• selected: A subset of info selected by query.

See Also

Other Dictionary functions: dictionary_meta(), download.dict(), lma_patcat(), lma_termcat(), read.dic(), report_term_matches()

Examples

# just retrieve information about available dictionaries
dicts <- select.dict()$info
dicts[1:10, 4:9]

# select all dictionaries mentioning sentiment or emotion
sentiment_dicts <- select.dict("sentiment emotion")$selected
sentiment_dicts[1:10, 4:9]