Split a corpus using a structural attribute without values

[ChristophLeonhardt]

If I am not mistaken, recent changes of polmineR should make it possible - or at least more robust - to split a corpus or subcorpus based on structural attributes without values. This might be relevant when the goal is to split a corpus into individual sentences: In some corpora, such as GermaParl2, sentences are annotated as structural attributes but they do not have values.

polmineR indicates if there are no values when querying an attribute like that:

s_attributes("GERMAPARL2", "s")
# ! s-attribute `s` does not have values, returning NA

I noticed something interesting. With the most recent development version of polmineR, it is possible to split a corpus into sentences:

sentences <- corpus("GERMAPARL2") |>
  subset(protocol_year == 2000) |>
  subset(p_type == "speech") |> 
  split(s_attribute = "s")

This does not seem to work for corpora:

corpus("GERMAPARL2") |>
    split(s_attribute = "s")

This returns a subcorpus bundle with the length of 1 and the size of the returned object is identical to the size of the entire corpus.

This is at least somewhat unexpected.

[ablaette]

This is something I have implemented in the meantime. Check the following example.

library(polmineR)
use("GermaParl2")

corpus("GERMAPARL2MINI") |>
  split(s_attribute = "s")