stopword

stopword is a node module that allows you to strip stopwords from an input text. In natural language processing, "Stopwords" are words that are so frequent that they can safely be removed from a text without altering its meaning.

Usage

Default (English)

By default, stopword will strip an array of "meaningless" English words

sw = require('stopword')
const oldString = 'a really Interesting string with some words'.split(' ')
const newString = sw.removeStopwords(oldString)
// newString is now [ 'really', 'Interesting', 'string', 'words' ]

Other languages

You can also specify a language other than English:

sw = require('stopword')
const oldString = 'Trädgårdsägare är beredda att pröva vad som helst för att bli av med de hatade mördarsniglarna åäö'.split(' ')
// sw.sv contains swedish stopwords
const newString = sw.removeStopwords(oldString, sw.sv)
// newString is now [ 'Trädgårdsägare', 'beredda', 'pröva', 'helst', 'hatade', 'mördarsniglarna', 'åäö' ]

Custom list of stopwords

And last, but not least, it is possible to use your own, custom list of stopwords:

sw = require('stopword')
const oldString = 'you can even roll your own custom stopword list'.split(' ')
// Just add your own list/array of stopwords
const newString = sw.removeStopwords(oldString, [ 'even', 'a', 'custom', 'stopword', 'list', 'is', 'possible']
// newString is now [ 'you', 'can', 'roll', 'your', 'own']

API

<language code>

Arrays of stopwords for the following languages are supplied:

• ar - Modern Standard Arabic
• bn - Bengali
• br - Brazilian Portuguese
• da - Danish
• de - German
• en - English
• es - Spanish
• fa - Farsi
• fr - French
• hi - Hindi
• it - Italian
• ja - Japanese
• nl - Dutch
• no - Norwegian
• pl - Polish
• pt - Portuguese
• ru - Russian
• sv - Swedish
• zh - Chinese Simplified

sw = require('stopword')
norwegianStopwords = sw.no
// norwegianStopwords now contains an Array of norwgian stopwords

Languages with no space between words

ja Japanese and zh Chinese Simplified have no space between words. For these languages you need to split the text into words before feeding it to the stopword module. You can check out TinySegmenter for Japanese and chinese-tokenizer for Chinese.

Your language missing?

If you can't find a stopword file for your language, you can try creating one with stopword-trainer. We're happy to help you in the process.

removeStopwords

Returns an Array that represents the text with the specified stopwords removed.

• text An array of words
• stopwords An array of stopwords

sw = require('stopword')
var text = sw.removeStopwords(text[, stopwords])
// text is now an array of given words minus specified stopwords

Release Notes:

version 0.0.4, removeStopwords returns an Array, since this removes ambiguity around separators.

version 0.1.0 getStopwords removed in favour of constants. removeStopwords takes text as an Array

version 0.1.2 Updated to ES6 simplified syntax

version 0.1.5 Making syntax ES5 compatible again

version 0.1.7 Brazilian Portuguese added

version 0.1.8 Documenting how to use custom stopword lists

version 0.1.9 Longer Brazilian Portuguese stopword list w/ duplicates removed

version 0.1.10 Updating from testing on version 4,5 and 6 to version 4,6,8 and 9 of Node.js