Python TfidfVectorizer throws: empty vocabulary; documents may contain only stop words "

Question

I am trying to use Python Tfidf to convert a body of text. However, when I try to fit_transform this, I get a ValueError error: empty dictionary; documents may contain only stop words.

In [69]: TfidfVectorizer().fit_transform(smallcorp)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-69-ac16344f3129> in <module>()
----> 1 TfidfVectorizer().fit_transform(smallcorp)

/Users/maxsong/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/sklearn/feature_extraction/text.pyc in fit_transform(self, raw_documents, y)
   1217         vectors : array, [n_samples, n_features]
   1218         """
-> 1219         X = super(TfidfVectorizer, self).fit_transform(raw_documents)
   1220         self._tfidf.fit(X)
   1221         # X is already a transformed view of raw_documents so

/Users/maxsong/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/sklearn/feature_extraction/text.pyc in fit_transform(self, raw_documents, y)
    778         max_features = self.max_features
    779 
--> 780         vocabulary, X = self._count_vocab(raw_documents, self.fixed_vocabulary)
    781         X = X.tocsc()
    782 

/Users/maxsong/anaconda/lib/python2.7/site-packages/sklearn/feature_extraction/text.pyc in _count_vocab(self, raw_documents, fixed_vocab)
    725             vocabulary = dict(vocabulary)
    726             if not vocabulary:
--> 727                 raise ValueError("empty vocabulary; perhaps the documents only"
    728                                  " contain stop words")
    729 

ValueError: empty vocabulary; perhaps the documents only contain stop words

I read the SO question here: Problems using a custom dictionary for TfidfVectorizer scikit-learn and tried to suggest ogrisel using TfidfVectorizer (** params) .build_analyzer () (dataset2) to check the results of the text analysis step and seems to work as expected: snippet below:

In [68]: TfidfVectorizer().build_analyzer()(smallcorp)
Out[68]: 
[u'due',
 u'to',
 u'lack',
 u'of',
 u'personal',
 u'biggest',
 u'education',
 u'and',
 u'husband',
 u'to',

Is there anything else I'm doing wrong? the case that I feed is just one giant long string, punctuated with new characters.

!

Answer 1

, . , :

In [51]: smallcorp
Out[51]: 'Ah! Now I have done Philosophy,\nI have finished Law and Medicine,\nAnd sadly even Theology:\nTaken fierce pains, from end to end.\nNow here I am, a fool for sure!\nNo wiser than I was before:'

In [52]: tf = TfidfVectorizer()

In [53]: tf.fit_transform(smallcorp.split('\n'))
Out[53]: 
<6x28 sparse matrix of type '<type 'numpy.float64'>'
    with 31 stored elements in Compressed Sparse Row format>

Answer 2

0.12 2, , , . , min_df=1. 0,13, . , , 0.12, ?

Answer 3

You can alternatively put your only string as a tuple if you insist on having only one row. Instead of:

smallcorp = "your text"

you would put it in a tuple.

In [22]: smallcorp = ("your text",)
In [23]: tf.fit_transform(smallcorp)
Out[23]: 
<1x2 sparse matrix of type '<type 'numpy.float64'>'
    with 2 stored elements in Compressed Sparse Row format>