How to remove top phrases from a word cloud

I have created a set of word clouds, but want to remove some common two-word phrases that appear in each.

I tried using removeWords, but it did not appear to work!

Is there a way to see what the top phrases are so that I could check if there are any extra spaces, for instance?

Answer 1

[Pat Canny]

The removeWords function only removes specific words. It won't remove phrases like you might expect.

The word clouds are showing n-grams, therefore you are looking remove common n-grams. To do so, use the removeNgrams function. Each phrase should be a 1x2 string array (see the "thou art" and "thou dost" example in the removeNgrams Documentation)

If you are interested in the top n-grams in a bag-of-n-grams model (which you used to create the word cloud), you can use the topkngrams function.

Alternatively (and this is not the preferred approach), you can extract the WordData from a word cloud object:

wc = wordcloud(bag);
wordData = wc.WordData;