wordfreq/CHANGELOG.md

Version 2.0.1 (2018-05-01)

Fixed edge cases that inserted spurious token boundaries when Japanese text is run through simple_tokenize, because of a few characters that don't match any of our "spaceless scripts".

It is not a typical situation for Japanese text to be passed through simple_tokenize, because Japanese text should instead use the Japanese-specific tokenization in wordfreq.mecab.

However, some downstream uses of wordfreq have justifiable reasons to pass all terms through simple_tokenize, even terms that may be in Japanese, and in those cases we want to detect only the most obvious token boundaries.

In this situation, we no longer try to detect script changes, such as between kanji and katakana, as token boundaries. This particularly allows us to keep together Japanese words where ヶ appears between kanji, as well as words that use the iteration mark 々.

This change does not affect any word frequencies. (The Japanese word list uses wordfreq.mecab for tokenization, not simple_tokenize.)

Version 2.0 (2018-03-14)

The big change in this version is that text preprocessing, tokenization, and postprocessing to look up words in a list are separate steps.

If all you need is preprocessing to make text more consistent, use wordfreq.preprocess.preprocess_text(text, lang). If you need preprocessing and tokenization, use wordfreq.tokenize(text, lang) as before. If you need all three steps, use the new function wordfreq.lossy_tokenize(text, lang).

As a breaking change, this means that the tokenize function no longer has the combine_numbers option, because that's a postprocessing step. For the same behavior, use lossy_tokenize, which always combines numbers.

Similarly, tokenize will no longer replace Chinese characters with their Simplified Chinese version, while lossy_tokenize will.

Other changes:

• There's a new default wordlist for each language, called "best". This chooses the "large" wordlist for that language, or if that list doesn't exist, it falls back on "small".

• The wordlist formerly named "combined" (this name made sense long ago) is now named "small". "combined" remains as a deprecated alias.

• The "twitter" wordlist has been removed. If you need to compare word frequencies from individual sources, you can work with the separate files in exquisite-corpus.

• Tokenizing Chinese will preserve the original characters, no matter whether they are Simplified or Traditional, instead of replacing them all with Simplified characters.

• Different languages require different processing steps, and the decisions about what these steps are now appear in the wordfreq.language_info module, replacing a bunch of scattered and inconsistent if statements.

• Tokenizing CJK languages while preserving punctuation now has a less confusing implementation.

• The preprocessing step can transliterate Azerbaijani, although we don't yet have wordlists in this language. This is similar to how the tokenizer supports many more languages than the ones with wordlists, making future wordlists possible.

• Speaking of that, the tokenizer will log a warning (once) if you ask to tokenize text written in a script we can't tokenize (such as Thai).

• New source data from exquisite-corpus includes OPUS OpenSubtitles 2018.

Nitty gritty dependency changes:

• Updated the regex dependency to 2018.02.21. (We would love suggestions on how to coexist with other libraries that use other versions of regex, without a >= requirement that could introduce unexpected data-altering changes.)

• We now depend on msgpack, the new name for msgpack-python.

Version 1.7.0 (2017-08-25)

• Tokenization will always keep Unicode graphemes together, including complex emoji introduced in Unicode 10
• Update the Wikipedia source data to April 2017
• Remove some non-words, such as the Unicode replacement character and the pilcrow sign, from frequency lists
• Support Bengali and Macedonian, which passed the threshold of having enough source data to be included

Version 1.6.1 (2017-05-10)

• Depend on langcodes 1.4, with a new language-matching system that does not depend on SQLite.

  This prevents silly conflicts where langcodes' SQLite connection was preventing langcodes from being used in threads.

Version 1.6.0 (2017-01-05)

• Support Czech, Persian, Ukrainian, and Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian
• Add large lists in Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, and Polish
• Data is now collected and built using Exquisite Corpus (https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/exquisite-corpus)
• Add word frequencies from OPUS OpenSubtitles 2016
• Add word frequencies from the MOKK Hungarian Webcorpus
• Expand Google Books Ngrams data to cover 8 languages
• Expand language detection on Reddit to cover 13 languages with large enough Reddit communities
• Drop the Common Crawl; we have enough good sources now that we don't have to deal with all that spam
• Add automatic transliteration of Serbian text
• Adjust tokenization of apostrophes next to vowel sounds: the French word "l'heure" is now tokenized similarly to "l'arc"
• Multi-digit numbers of each length are smashed into the same word frequency, to remove meaningless differences and increase compatibility with word2vec. (Internally, their digits are replaced by zeroes.)
• Another new frequency-merging strategy (drop the highest and lowest, average the rest)

Version 1.5.1 (2016-08-19)

• Bug fix: Made it possible to load the Japanese or Korean dictionary when the other one is not available

Version 1.5.0 (2016-08-08)

• Include word frequencies learned from the Common Crawl
• Support Bulgarian, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Norwegian Bokmål, and Romanian
• Improve Korean with MeCab tokenization
• New frequency-merging strategy (weighted median)
• Include Wikipedia as a Chinese source (mostly Traditional)
• Include Reddit as a Spanish source
• Remove Greek Twitter because its data is poorly language-detected
• Add large lists in Arabic, Dutch, Italian
• Remove marks from more languages
• Deal with commas and cedillas in Turkish and Romanian
• Fix tokenization of Southeast and South Asian scripts
• Clean up Git history by removing unused large files

Announcement blog post

Version 1.4 (2016-06-02)

• Add large lists in English, German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese
• Add zipf_frequency function

Announcement blog post

Version 1.3 (2016-01-14)

• Add Reddit comments as an English source

Version 1.2 (2015-10-29)

• Add SUBTLEX data
• Better support for Chinese, using Jieba for tokenization, and mapping Traditional Chinese characters to Simplified
• Improve Greek
• Add Polish, Swedish, and Turkish
• Tokenizer can optionally preserve punctuation
• Detect when sources stripped "'t" off of English words, and repair their frequencies

Announcement blog post

Version 1.1 (2015-08-25)

• Use the 'regex' package to implement Unicode tokenization that's mostly consistent across languages
• Use NFKC normalization in Japanese and Arabic

Version 1.0 (2015-07-28)

• Create compact word frequency lists in English, Arabic, German, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Malay, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian
• Marginal support for Greek, Korean, Chinese
• Fresh start, dropping compatibility with wordfreq 0.x and its unreasonably large downloads