functionwords

The functionwords package provides curated Chinese and English function words. It supports five function word lists, as listed below. Chinese function words are only available in simplified form.

The FunctionWords class does the heavy lifting. Initiate it with the desired function_words_list. The instance has two methods transform() and get_feature_names()) and three attributes (function_words_list, function_words, and description).

For more details, see FunctionWords instance's attribute description.

Installation

pip install -U functionwords

Getting started

from functionwords import FunctionWords

raw = "The present King of Singapore is bald."

# to instantiate a FunctionWords instance
# `function_words_list` can be either 'chinese_classical_comprehensive', 
# 'chinese_classical_naive', 'chinese_simplified_modern', or 'english'
fw = FunctionWords(function_words_list='english')

# to count function words accordingly
# returns a list of counts
fw.transform(raw)

# to list all function words given `function_words_list`
# returns a list
fw.get_feature_names()

Requirements

Only Python 3.8+ is required.

Important links

• Source code: https://github.com/Wang-Haining/functionwords
• Issue tracker: https://github.com/Wang-Haining/functionwords/issues

Version

• Created on March 17, 2021. v.0.5, launch.
• Modified on Nov. 19, 2021. v.0.6, fix bugs in extracting Chinese ngram features.
• Modified on Jan. 03, 2022. v.0.7, add chinese_comprehensive feature set.
• Modified on Jan. 23, 2022. v.0.8, count Chinese ngram features finely.

Licence

This package is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

References

[1]: Ziqiang, W. (1998). Modern Chinese Dictionary of Function Words. Shanghai Dictionary Press.

[2]: https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80%E8%99%9A%E8%AF%8D and https://zh.m.wikibooks.org/zh-hans/%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80/%E8%99%9B%E8%A9%9E

[3]: Hai, W., Changhai, Z., Shan, H., Keying, W. (1996). Classical Chinese Dictionary of Function Words. Peking University Press.