Lexical Analysis is the process of converting unstructured text into a structured format, typically a list of words or tokens. Lexicon definition involves reducing a word to its root form. For example, the word “walking” would be reduced to “walk” This process is also known as lemmatization or tokenization. Lexical Analysis may also be referred to as Morphological Analysis, which is the study of the structure and form of words. This process can involve word stemming, which
While Lexical Analysis is most commonly used in the text analytics industry, the term may also be used in other industries. For example, in computer programming, Lexical Analysis is the process of converting program
Steps in Lexical Analysis
A lexicon is basically a collection of words used in a particular language. For example, the English lexicon includes words such as “cat,” “dog,” and “house.”
To perform lexical analysis, here are the seven steps involved:
- Language identification. This step is determining whether a document is written in English, Spanish, or French.
- Tokenization. This step is breaking a sentence down into its individual words. An example of stemming is taking the word “walk” and reducing it to its root form, “walk.”
- Sentence Breaking. This is determining where one sentence ends and another begins.
- Speech Tagging. This is determining whether a word is a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb.
- Chunking. This is breaking a sentence down into smaller pieces, such as phrases.
- Syntax Parsing. This is determining the grammatical structure of a sentence.
- Sentence chaining. This is determining the order in which words appear in a sentence.
Benefits of Lexical Analysis in Data Mining
There are a few benefits that come with lexical analysis, especially in data mining.
First, it can help to reduce the amount of storage space required. When you break a sentence down into its individual words, it takes up less space than when the sentence is stored as a whole.
Second, it can help to improve the efficiency of search operations. When you have a list of words, it is easier to find the word you are looking for than when you have a sentence.
Third, it can help to improve the accuracy of results. When you have a list of words, you can more easily identify the context in which each word is used. This can be helpful in identifying the meaning of a word.