VoC Mine - Stop word dictionaries

Overview

Stop word analysis is performed by VoC Mine in two main ways:

1. Automated language-specific removal of common stop words which removes frequently used words such a, an and the from the query. This process is automated and the list of these predefined stop words cannot be changed by end users.
2. Custom stop word dictionary created by users. This article describes this second way of stop word editing further.

In certain cases you might want to exclude certain words from lemmata list on an ongoing basis. For example, you have 10 queries with certain shared lemmata which you want to exclude. In this case you can use stop word dictionary to add such lemmata just once and then use the dictionary to exclude it.

It is expected that you use lemmata and not individual text cases in stop word dictionaries. Each dictionary consists of simply a list of lemmata you want to be excluded from some query later. You can name the dictionaries to group certain stop words by their meaning and reuse the dictionaries across multiple queries.

Just like with synonym dictionaries, stop word dictionaries only affect the cloud, table and chart lemmata views within the query editor. They don't affect exports or lemmata in text cases themselves.

Please see "Scope of applicability" section to see how this functionality is integrated into the product.

Stop word dictionaries

Allows to edit or delete existing dictionaries

Add stop words dictionary

Allows to add a new stop word dictionary

In order to add a new dictionary please provide a title for the dictionary and add the required stop words as shown in the animation above.

Scope of applicability

Lemmata view

When applied, the aforementioned dictionary will make all lemmata contained within the dictionary to be excluded from all lemmata views: cloud, table and chart.

Other

Please note that stop word dictionaries don't affect actual lemmata count and lemmata list (if included) in the export files. Stop word dictionaries don't affect the lemmata displayed in the text case details.