MATLAB wordcloud in MATLAB^®

Learn how to make 5 wordcloud charts in MATLAB, then publish them to the Web with Plotly.

Create Word Cloud from Table

Load the example data sonnetsTable. The table tbl contains a list of words in the variable Word, and the corresponding frequency counts in the variable Count.

load sonnetsTable head(tbl)

ans=8×2 table
       Word        Count
    ___________    _____

    {'''tis'  }      1  
    {''Amen'' }      1  
    {''Fair'  }      2  
    {''Gainst'}      1  
    {''Since' }      1  
    {''This'  }      2  
    {''Thou'  }      1  
    {''Thus'  }      1

Plot the table data using `wordcloud`. Specify the words and corresponding word sizes to be the `Word` and `Count` variables respectively.

figure
wordcloud(tbl,'Word','Count');
title("Sonnets Word Cloud")

fig2plotly()

Prepare Text Data for Word Clouds

If you have Text Analytics Toolbox™ installed, then you can create word clouds directly from string arrays. For more information, see wordcloud (Text Analytics Toolbox) (Text Analytics Toolbox). If you do not have Text Analytics Toolbox, then you must preprocess the text data manually.

This example shows how to create a word cloud from plain text by reading it into a string array, preprocessing it, and passing it to the wordcloud function.

Read the text from Shakespeare's Sonnets with the fileread function and convert it to string.

sonnets = string(fileread('sonnets.txt')); extractBefore(sonnets,"II")

ans = 
    "THE SONNETS
     
     by William Shakespeare
     
     
     
     
       I
     
       From fairest creatures we desire increase,
       That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
       But as the riper should by time decease,
       His tender heir might bear his memory:
       But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
       Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
       Making a famine where abundance lies,
       Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
       Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
       And only herald to the gaudy spring,
       Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
       And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
         Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
         To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
     
       "

Split `sonnets` into a string array whose elements contain individual words. To do this, remove the punctuation characters and join all the string elements into a 1-by-1 string and then split on the space characters. Then, remove words with fewer than five characters and convert the words to lowercase. punctuationCharacters = ["." "?" "!" "," ";" ":"]; sonnets = replace(sonnets,punctuationCharacters," "); words = split(join(sonnets)); words(strlength(words)<5) = []; words = lower(words); words(1:10)

ans = 10x1 string
    "sonnets"
    "william"
    "shakespeare"
    "fairest"
    "creatures"
    "desire"
    "increase"
    "thereby"
    "beauty's"
    "might"

Convert `sonnets` to a categorical array and then plot using `wordcloud`. The function plots the unique elements of `C` with sizes corresponding to their frequency counts.

C = categorical(words);
figure
wordcloud(C);
title("Sonnets Word Cloud")

fig2plotly()

Specify Word Sizes

Create a word cloud from plain text by reading it into a string array, preprocessing it, and passing it to the wordcloud function.

Read the text from Shakespeare's Sonnets with the fileread function and convert it to string.

sonnets = string(fileread('sonnets.txt')); extractBefore(sonnets,"II")

ans = 
    "THE SONNETS
     
     by William Shakespeare
     
     
     
     
       I
     
       From fairest creatures we desire increase,
       That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
       But as the riper should by time decease,
       His tender heir might bear his memory:
       But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
       Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
       Making a famine where abundance lies,
       Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
       Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
       And only herald to the gaudy spring,
       Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
       And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
         Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
         To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
     
       "

ans = 10x1 string
    "sonnets"
    "william"
    "shakespeare"
    "fairest"
    "creatures"
    "desire"
    "increase"
    "thereby"
    "beauty's"
    "might"

Find the unique words in `sonnets` and count their frequency. Create a word cloud using the frequency counts as size data.

[numOccurrences,uniqueWords] = histcounts(categorical(words));
figure
wordcloud(uniqueWords,numOccurrences);
title("Sonnets Word Cloud")

fig2plotly()

Specify Word Colors

Load the example data sonnetsTable. The table tbl contains a list of words in the Word variable, and corresponding frequency counts in the Count variable.

load sonnetsTable head(tbl)

ans=8×2 table
       Word        Count
    ___________    _____

    {'''tis'  }      1  
    {''Amen'' }      1  
    {''Fair'  }      2  
    {''Gainst'}      1  
    {''Since' }      1  
    {''This'  }      2  
    {''Thou'  }      1  
    {''Thus'  }      1

Plot the table data using `wordcloud`. Specify the words and corresponding word sizes to be the `Word` and `Count` variables respectively. To set the word colors to random values, set `'Color'` to a random matrix or RGB triplets with one row for each word.

numWords = size(tbl,1);
colors = rand(numWords,3);
figure
wordcloud(tbl,'Word','Count','Color',colors);
title("Sonnets Word Cloud")

fig2plotly()

Create Word Cloud Using Text Analytics Toolbox

If you have Text Analytics Toolbox installed, then you can create word clouds directly from string arrays. If you do not have Text Analytics Toolbox, then you must preprocess the text data manually. For an example showing how to create a word cloud without Text Analytics Toolbox, see Prepare Text Data for Word Clouds.

Extract the text from sonnets.txt using extractFileText`.

str = extractFileText("sonnets.txt"); extractBefore(str,"II")

ans = 

    "THE SONNETS
     
     by William Shakespeare
     
     
     
     
       I
     
       From fairest creatures we desire increase,
       That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
       But as the riper should by time decease,
       His tender heir might bear his memory:
       But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
       Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
       Making a famine where abundance lies,
       Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
       Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
       And only herald to the gaudy spring,
       Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
       And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
         Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
         To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
     
       "

Display the words from the sonnets in a word cloud.

figure
wordcloud(str);

fig2plotly()