Common contracted forms are missing from the English stop word list

[DavidNemeskey]

While the list contains s and t (most likely because they can occur after an apostrophe as part of a contraction in e.g. dog's and can't), other common forms, i.e.

• d as in she'd,
• ll as in we'll,
• m as in I'm,
• o as in o'clock,
• re as in you're,
• ve as in they've,
• y as in y'all
  are missing.

Also missing are the parts of these contractions that fall to the left of the apostrophe, e.g. ain (but don is there).

Of course, the lack of these forms could be justified by pointing out that if the tokenizer does not split by apostrophes, then these forms will not occur in the tokenized text. However, it is a strong assumption, especially taking into account that nltk's own Punkt tokenizer, for instance, does split at the apostrophes. Also, some of the contractions seem to be handled (don't , can't, the possessive s), so it does not make sense to not include the rest.

[DavidNemeskey]

This issue can be solved by appending the following list of words to the English stop word list:

d
ll
m
o
re
ve
y
ain
aren
couldn
didn
doesn
hadn
hasn
haven
isn
ma
mightn
mustn
needn
shan
shouldn
wasn
weren
won
wouldn

Unfortunately, I don't know how to contribute data changes to this project; opening a PR for a zip file feels a bit strange.

[stevenbird]

Thanks @DavidNemeskey, and sorry for the long delay.

[aellenhicks]

Why is 'ma' on the list? I tried searching for contractions with 'ma' and only came up with 'ma'am'.

[tsolakghukasyan]

@aellenhicks also in "gran'ma", "Im'ma", "I'ma", I think.

[aellenhicks]

Thanks!

From: Tsolak Ghukasyan <notifications@github.commailto:notifications@github.com>
Reply-To: nltk/nltk_data <reply@reply.github.commailto:reply@reply.github.com>
Date: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 1:48 PM
To: nltk/nltk_data <nltk_data@noreply.github.commailto:nltk_data@noreply.github.com>
Cc: aellenhicks <aellenhicks@gmail.commailto:aellenhicks@gmail.com>, Mention <mention@noreply.github.commailto:mention@noreply.github.com>
Subject: Re: [nltk/nltk_data] Common contracted forms are missing from the English stop word list (#22)

@aellenhickshttps://github.com/aellenhicks also in "gran'ma", "Im'ma", "I'ma", I think.

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[tenstriker]

why would "won" be part of english stop word? Seems incorrect way to separate out "won" and "t"

[DavidNemeskey]

@tenstriker I completely agree, "won" is a meaningful word; I should not have added it to the list.

Maybe instead of a stop word list, an ngram-based detection would be better, but I don't know if Nltk has that.