Help for package SemNetCleaner

Title:

An Automated Cleaning Tool for Semantic and Linguistic Data

Version:

1.3.7

Date:

2025-05-08

Maintainer:

Alexander P. Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Description:

Implements several functions that automates the cleaning and spell-checking of text data. Also converges, finalizes, removes plurals and continuous strings, and puts text data in binary format for semantic network analysis. Uses the 'SemNetDictionaries' package to make the cleaning process more accurate, efficient, and reproducible.

License:

GPL (≥ 3.0)

URL:

https://github.com/AlexChristensen/SemNetCleaner

BugReports:

https://github.com/AlexChristensen/SemNetCleaner/issues

NeedsCompilation:

Encoding:

UTF-8

LazyData:

true

Depends:

R (≥ 3.6.0), SemNetDictionaries (≥ 0.1.8)

Imports:

foreign, parallel, pbapply, R.matlab, readxl, rstudioapi, searcher, shiny, stringi, stringdist, tcltk

Suggests:

DT, hunspell, easycsv, htmlTable, knitr, markdown, rmarkdown

VignetteBuilder:

knitr

RoxygenNote:

7.3.2

Packaged:

2025-05-08 14:43:44 UTC; alextops

Author:

Alexander P. Christensen

[aut, cre]

Repository:

CRAN

Date/Publication:

2025-05-08 15:10:02 UTC

SemNetCleaner–package

Description

Implements several functions that automates the cleaning and spell-checking of text data. Also converges, finalizes, removes plurals and continuous strings, and puts text data in binary format for semantic network analysis. Uses the SemNetDictionaries package to make the cleaning process more accurate, efficient, and reproducible.

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Bad Responses to NA

Description

A wrapper function to determine whether responses are good or bad. Bad responses are replaced with missing (NA). Good responses are returned.

Usage

bad.response(word, ...)

Arguments

word

Character. A word to be tested for whether it is bad

...

Vector. Additional responses to be considered bad

Value

If response is bad, then returns NA. If response is valid, then returns the response

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Examples

# Bad response
bad.response(word = " ")

# Good response
bad.response(word = "hello")

# Make a good response bad
bad.response(word = "hello","hello")

# Add additional bad responses
bad.response(word = "hello", c("hello","world"))

Makes Best Guess for Spelling Correction

Description

A wrapper function for the best guess of a spelling mistake based on the letters, the ordering of those letters, and the potential for letters to be interchanged. The Damerau-Levenshtein distance is used to guide inferences into what word the participant was trying to spell from a dictionary (see SemNetDictionaries)

Usage

best.guess(word, full.dictionary, dictionary = NULL, tolerance = 1)

Arguments

word

Character. A word to get best guess spelling options from dictionary

full.dictionary

Character vector. The dictionary to search for best guesses in. See SemNetDictionaries

dictionary

Character. A dictionary from SemNetDictionaries for monikers (enhances guessing)

tolerance

Numeric. The distance tolerance set for automatic spell-correction purposes. This function uses the function stringdist to compute the Damerau-Levenshtein distance, which is used to determine potential best guesses

Unique words (i.e., n = 1) that are within the (distance) tolerance are automatically output as best guess responses. This default is based on Damerau's (1964) proclamation that more than 80% of all human misspellings can be expressed by a single error (e.g., insertion, deletion, substitution, and transposition). If there is more than one word that is within or below the distance tolerance, then these will be provided as potential options.

The recommended and default distance tolerance is tolerance = 1, which only spell corrects a word if there is only one word with a DL distance of 1.

Value

The best guess(es) of the word

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

References

Damerau, F. J. (1964). A technique for computer detection and correction of spelling errors. Communications of the ACM, 7, 171-176.

Examples

# Misspelled "bombay"
best.guess("bomba", full.dictionary = SemNetDictionaries::animals.dictionary)

Binary Responses to Character Responses

Description

Converts the binary response matrix into characters for each participant

Usage

bin2resp(rmat, to.data.frame = FALSE)

Arguments

rmat

Binary matrix. A binarized response matrix of verbal fluency or linguistic data

to.data.frame

Boolean. Should output be a data frame where participants are columns? Defaults to FALSE. Set to TRUE to convert output to data frame

Value

A list containing objects for each participant and their responses

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Examples

# Toy example
raw <- open.animals[c(1:10),-c(1:3)]

if(interactive())
{
  # Clean and prepocess data
  clean <- textcleaner(open.animals[,-c(1:2)], partBY = "row", dictionary = "animals")

  # Change binary response matrix to word response matrix
  charmat <- bin2resp(clean$responses$binary)
}

Converts `textcleaner` object to a SNAFU GUI format

Description

Converts textcleaner object to a SNAFU GUI format (only works for fluency data)

Usage

convert2snafu(..., category)

Arguments

...

Matrix or data frame. A clean response matrices

category

Character. Category of verbal fluency data

Details

The format of the file has 7 columns:

id — Defaults to the row names of the inputted data
listnum — The list number for the fluency category. Defaults to 0. Future implementations will allow more lists
category — The verbal fluency category that is input into the category argument
item — The verbal fluency responses for every participant
RT — Response time. Currently not implemented. Defaults to 0
RTstart — Start of response time. Currently not implemented. Defaults to 0
group — Names of groups. Defaults to the names of the objects input into the function (...)

Value

A .csv file formatted for SNAFU

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

References

# For SNAFU, see: Zemla, J. C., Cao, K., Mueller, K. D., & Austerweil, J. L. (2020). SNAFU: The Semantic Network and Fluency Utility. Behavior Research Methods, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01343-w

Examples

# Convert data to SNAFU
if(interactive())
{convert2snafu(open.clean, category = "animals")}

Letter Frequencies Based on 40,000 Words

Description

A vector corresponding the frequency of letters across 40,000 words. Retrieved from: http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~mec/2003-2004/cryptography/subs/frequencies.html

Usage

data(letter.freq)

Format

letter.freq (26-element numeric vector)

Examples

data("letter.freq")

Openness and Verbal Fluency

Description

Raw Animals verbal fluency data (n = 516) from Christensen et al. (2018).

Usage

data(open.animals)

Format

open.animals (matrix 516 x 38)

Details

First column is a grouping variable ("Group") with 1 corresponding to low openness to experience and 2 to high openness to experience

Second column is the latent variable of openness to experience with Intellect items removed (see Christensen et al., 2018 for more details).

Third column is the ID variable for each participant.

Columns 4-38 are raw fluency data.

References

Christensen, A. P., Kenett, Y. N., Cotter, K. N., Beaty, R. E., & Silvia, P. J. (2018). Remotely close associations: Openness to experience and semantic memory structure. European Journal of Personality, 32, 480-492.

Examples

data("open.animals")

Cleaned Response Matrices (Openness and Verbal Fluency)

Description

Cleaned response matrices for the Animals verbal fluency data (n = 516) from Christensen et al. (2018).

Usage

data(open.clean)

Format

open.clean (matrix, 516 x 35)

References

Examples

data("open.clean")

Preprocessed `textcleaner` Object (Openness and Verbal Fluency)

Description

Preprocessed textcleaner object for the Animals verbal fluency data (n = 516) from Christensen and Kenett (2020).

Usage

data(open.preprocess)

Format

open.preprocess (list, length = 4)

References

Christensen, A. P., & Kenett, Y. N. (2020). Semantic network analysis (SemNA): A tutorial on preprocessing, estimating, and analyzing semantic networks. PsyArxiv.

Examples

data("open.preprocess")

Converts Words to their Plural Form

Description

A function to change words to their plural form. The rules for converting words to their plural forms are based on the grammar rules.

This function handles most special cases and some irregular cases (see examples) but caution is necessary. If no plural form is identified, then the original word is returned.

Usage

pluralize(word)

Arguments

word

A word

Value

Returns the word in singular form, unless a plural form could not be found (then the original word is returned)

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Examples

# Handles any prototypical cases
"dogs"
pluralize("dog")

"foxes"
pluralize("fox")

"wolves"
pluralize("wolf")

"octopi"
pluralize("octopus")

"taxa"
pluralize("taxon")

# And most special cases:
"wives"
pluralize("wife")

"roofs"
pluralize("roof")

"photos"
pluralize("photo")

# And some irregular cases:
"children"
pluralize("child")

"teeth"
pluralize("tooth")

"mice"
pluralize("mouse")

QWERTY Distance for Same Length Words

Description

Computes QWERTY Distance for words that have the same number of characters. Distance is computed based on the number of keys a character is away from another character on a QWERTY keyboard

Usage

qwerty.dist(wordA, wordB)

Arguments

wordA

Character vector. Word to be compared

wordB

Character vector. Word to be compared

Value

Numeric value for distance between wordA and wordB

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Examples

#Identical values for Damerau-Levenshtein 
stringdist::stringdist("big", "pig", method="dl")

stringdist::stringdist("big", "bug", method="dl")

#Different distances for QWERTY
qwerty.dist("big", "pig")

qwerty.dist("big", "bug") # Probably meant to type "bug"

Read in Common Data File Extensions

Description

A single function to read in common data file extensions. Note that this function is specialized for reading in text data in the format necessary for functions in SemNetCleaner

File extensions supported:

.Rdata
.rds
.csv
.xlsx
.xls
.sav
.txt
.mat
.dat

Usage

read.data(file = file.choose(), header = TRUE, sep = ",", ...)

Arguments

file

Character. A path to the file to load. Defaults to interactive file selection using file.choose

header

Boolean. A logical value indicating whether the file contains the names of the variables as its first line. If missing, the value is determined from the file format: header is set to TRUE if and only if the first row contains one fewer field than the number of columns

sep

Character. The field separator character. Values on each line of the file are separated by this character. If sep = "" (the default for read.table) the separator is a 'white space', that is one or more spaces, tabs, newlines or carriage returns

...

Additional arguments. Allows for additional arguments to be passed onto the respective read functions. See documentation in the list below:

.Rdata load
.rds readRDS
.csv read.table
.xlsx read_excel
.xls read_excel
.sav read.spss
.txt read.table
.mat readMat
.dat read.table

Value

A data frame containing a representation of the data in the file. If file extension is ".Rdata", then data will be read to the global environment

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

References

# R Core Team

R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL https://www.R-project.org/.

# readxl

Hadley Wickham and Jennifer Bryan (2019). readxl: Read Excel Files. R package version 1.3.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=readxl

# R.matlab

Henrik Bengtsson (2018). R.matlab: Read and Write MAT Files and Call MATLAB from Within R. R package version 3.6.2. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=R.matlab

Examples

# Use this example for your data
if(interactive())
{read.data()}

# Example for CRAN tests
## Create test data
test1 <- c(1:5, "6,7", "8,9,10")

## Path to temporary file
tf <- tempfile()

## Create test file
writeLines(test1, tf)

## Read in data
read.data(tf)

# See documentation of respective R functions for specific examples

Responses to binary matrix

Description

Converts the response matrix to binary response matrix

Usage

resp2bin(resp)

Arguments

resp

Response matrix. A response matrix of verbal fluency or linguistic data

Value

A list containing objects for each participant and their responses

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Examples

# Toy example
raw <- open.animals[c(1:10),-c(1:3)]

if(interactive())
{
  # Clean and prepocess data
  clean <- textcleaner(open.animals[,-c(1:2)], partBY = "row", dictionary = "animals")

  # Change response matrix to binary response matrix
  binmat <- resp2bin(clean$responses$corrected)
}

Converts Words to their Singular Form

Description

A function to change words to their singular form. The rules for converting words to their singular forms are based on the inverse of the grammar rules. This function handles most special cases and some irregular cases (see examples) but caution is necessary. If no singular form is identified, then the original word is returned.

Usage

singularize(word, dictionary = TRUE)

Arguments

word

Character. A word

dictionary

Boolean. Should dictionary be used to verify word exists? Default to TRUE

Value

Returns the word in singular form, unless a singular form could not be found (then the original word is returned)

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

Examples

# Handles any prototypical cases
# "dog"
singularize("dogs")

# "fox"
singularize("foxes")

# "wolf"
singularize("wolves")

# "octopus"
singularize("octopi")

# "taxon"
singularize("taxa")

# And most special cases:
# "wife"
singularize("wives")

# "fez"
singularize("fezzes")

# "roof"
singularize("roofs")

# "photo"
singularize("photos")

# And some irregular cases:
# "child"
singularize("children")

# "tooth"
singularize("teeth")

# "mouse"
singularize("mice")

Text Cleaner

Description

An automated cleaning function for spell-checking, de-pluralizing, removing duplicates, and binarizing text data

Usage

textcleaner(
  data = NULL,
  type = c("fluency", "free"),
  miss = 99,
  partBY = c("row", "col"),
  dictionary = NULL,
  spelling = c("UK", "US"),
  add.path = NULL,
  keepStrings = FALSE,
  allowPunctuations,
  allowNumbers = FALSE,
  lowercase = TRUE,
  keepLength = NULL,
  keepCue = FALSE,
  continue = NULL
)

Arguments

data

Matrix or data frame.

For task = "fluency", data are expected to follow wide formatting (IDs are the row names and are not a column in the matrix or data frame):

`row.names`	Response 1	Response 2	Response n
ID_1	1	2	n
ID_2	1	2	n
ID_n	1	2	n

For task = "free", data are expected to follow long formatting:

ID	Cue	Response
1	1	1
1	1	2
1	1	n
1	2	1
1	2	2
1	2	n
1	n	1
1	n	2
1	n	n
2	1	1
2	1	2
2	1	n
2	2	1
2	2	2
2	2	n
2	n	1
2	n	2
2	n	n
n	1	1
n	1	2
n	1	n
n	2	1
n	2	2
n	2	n
n	n	1
n	n	2
n	n	n

type

Character vector. Type of task to be preprocessed.

"fluency" — Verbal fluency data (e.g., categories, phonological, synonyms)
"free" — Free association data (e.g., cue terms or words)

miss

Numeric or character. Value for missing data. Defaults to 99

partBY

Character. Are participants by row or column? Set to "row" for by row. Set to "col" for by column

dictionary

Character vector. Can be a vector of a corpus or any text for comparison. Dictionary to be used for more efficient text cleaning. Defaults to NULL, which will use general.dictionary

Use dictionaries() or find.dictionaries() for more options (See SemNetDictionaries for more details)

spelling

Character vector. English spelling to be used.

"UK" — For British spelling (e.g., colour, grey, programme, theatre)
"US" — For American spelling (e.g., color, gray, program, theater)

add.path

Character. Path to additional dictionaries to be found. DOES NOT search recursively (through all folders in path) to avoid time intensive search. Set to "choose" to open an interactive directory explorer

keepStrings

Boolean. Should strings be retained or separated? Defaults to FALSE. Set to TRUE to retain strings as strings

allowPunctuations

Character vector. Allows punctuation characters to be included in responses. Defaults to "-". Set to "all" to keep all punctuation characters

allowNumbers

Boolean. Defaults to FALSE. Set to TRUE to keep numbers in text

lowercase

Boolean. Should words be converted to lowercase? Defaults to TRUE. Set to FALSE to keep words as they are

keepLength

Numeric. Maximum number of words allowed in a response. Defaults to NULL. Set a number to keep responses with words less than or equal to the number (e.g., 3 will keep responses with three or less words)

keepCue

Boolean. Should cue words be retained in the responses? Defaults to FALSE. Set to TRUE to allow cue words to be retained

continue

List. A result previously unfinished that still needs to be completed. Allows you to continue to manually spell-check their data after you've closed or errored out. Defaults to NULL

Value

This function returns a list containing the following objects:

binary

A matrix of responses where each row represents a participant and each column represents a unique response. A response that a participant has provided is a '1' and a response that a participant has not provided is a '0'

responses

A list containing two objects:

clean — A response matrix that has been spell-checked and de-pluralized with duplicates removed. This can be used as a final dataset for analyses (e.g., fluency of responses)
original — The original response matrix that has had white spaces before and after words response. Also converts all upper-case letters to lower case

spellcheck

A list containing three objects:

full — All responses regardless of spell-checking changes
auto — Only the incorrect responses that were changed during spell-check

removed

A list containing two objects:

rows — Identifies removed participants by their row (or column) location in the original data file
ids — Identifies removed participants by their ID (see argument data)

partChanges

A list where each participant is a list index with each response that was been changed. Participants are identified by their ID (see argument data). This can be used to replicate the cleaning process and to keep track of changes more generally. Participants with NA did not have any changes from their original data and participants with missing data are removed (see removed$ids)

Author(s)

Alexander Christensen <alexpaulchristensen@gmail.com>

References

Christensen, A. P., & Kenett, Y. N. (in press). Semantic network analysis (SemNA): A tutorial on preprocessing, estimating, and analyzing semantic networks. Psychological Methods.

Hornik, K., & Murdoch, D. (2010). Watch Your Spelling!. The R Journal, 3, 22-28.

Examples

# Toy example
raw <- open.animals[c(1:10),-c(1:3)]

if(interactive())
{
    #Full test
    clean <- textcleaner(open.animals[,-c(1,2)], partBY = "row", dictionary = "animals")
}

SemNetCleaner–package

Description

Author(s)

See Also

Bad Responses to NA

Description

Usage

Arguments

Value

Author(s)

Examples

Makes Best Guess for Spelling Correction

Description

Usage

Arguments

Value

Author(s)

References

Examples

Binary Responses to Character Responses

Description

Usage

Arguments

Value

Author(s)

Examples

Converts textcleaner object to a SNAFU GUI format

Description

Usage

Arguments

Details

Value

Author(s)

References

Examples

Letter Frequencies Based on 40,000 Words

Description

Usage

Format

Examples

Openness and Verbal Fluency

Description

Usage

Format

Details

References

Examples

Cleaned Response Matrices (Openness and Verbal Fluency)

Description

Usage

Format

References

Examples

Preprocessed textcleaner Object (Openness and Verbal Fluency)

Description

Usage

Format

References

Examples

Converts Words to their Plural Form

Description

Usage

Arguments

Value

Author(s)

Examples

QWERTY Distance for Same Length Words

Description

Usage

Arguments

Value

Author(s)

Examples

Read in Common Data File Extensions

Description

Usage

Arguments

Value

Author(s)

References

Converts `textcleaner` object to a SNAFU GUI format

Preprocessed `textcleaner` Object (Openness and Verbal Fluency)