replace_word_elongation {textclean}

Replace Word Elongations

Description

In informal writing people may use a form of text embellishment to emphasize or alter word meanings called elongation (a.k.a. "word lengthening"). For example, the use of "Whyyyyy" conveys frustration. Other times the usage may be to be more sexy (e.g., "Heyyyy there"). Other times it may be used for emphasis (e.g., "This is so gooood"). This function uses an augmented form of Armstrong & Fogarty's (2007) algorithm. The algorithm first attempts to replace the elongation with known semantic replacements (optional; default is FALSE). After this the algorithm locates all places were the same letter (case insensitive) appears 3 times consecutively. These elements are then further processed. The matches are replaced via fgsub by first taking the elongation to it's canonical form (drop all > 1 consecutive letters to a single letter) and then replacing with the most common word used in 2008 in Google's ngram data set that takes the canonical form. If the canonical form is not found in the Google data set then the canonical form is used as the replacement.

Usage

replace_word_elongation(x, impart.meaning = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

x

The text variable.

impart.meaning

logical. If TRUE, known elongation semantics are used as replacements (see textclean:::meaning_elongations for known elongation semantics and replacements).

...

ignored.

Value

Returns a vector with word elongations replaced.

References

Armstrong, D. B., Fogarty, G. J., & Dingsdag, D. (2007). Scales measuring characteristics of small business information systems. Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 562-570). Edinburgh, Scotland. Retrieved from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D11-1052

http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/dragging-it-out/309220

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/189517/is-there-a-name-term-for-multiplied-vowels

Examples

x <- c('look', 'noooooo!', 'real coooool!', "it's sooo goooood", 'fsdfds', 
    'fdddf', 'as', "aaaahahahahaha", "aabbccxccbbaa", 'I said heyyy!',
    "I'm liiiike whyyyyy me?", "Wwwhhatttt!", NA)

replace_word_elongation(x)
replace_word_elongation(x, impart.meaning = TRUE)