Wordcloud Plot in MATLAB^®

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)

...ERROR...
Unable to find file or directory 'sonnetsTable'.  It is found in 
matlab/CreateWordCloudFromTableExample'.

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

load sonnetsTable

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

fig2plotly(gcf);

"To be inmplemented soon"

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")

...ERROR...
Could not open file sonnets.txt. No such file or directory.

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.

sonnets = string(fileread('sonnets.txt'));

punctuationCharacters = ["." "?" "!" "," ";" ":"];
sonnets = replace(sonnets,punctuationCharacters," ");
words = split(join(sonnets));
words(strlength(words)<5) = [];
words = lower(words);
words(1:10)

...ERROR...
Could not open file sonnets.txt. No such file or directory.

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.

sonnets = string(fileread('sonnets.txt'));

punctuationCharacters = ["." "?" "!" "," ";" ":"];
sonnets = replace(sonnets,punctuationCharacters," ");
words = split(join(sonnets));
words(strlength(words)<5) = [];
words = lower(words);

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

fig2plotly(gcf);

"To be inmplemented soon"

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")

...ERROR...
Could not open file sonnets.txt. No such file or directory.

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.

sonnets = string(fileread('sonnets.txt'));

punctuationCharacters = ["." "?" "!" "," ";" ":"];
sonnets = replace(sonnets,punctuationCharacters," ");
words = split(join(sonnets));
words(strlength(words)<5) = [];
words = lower(words);
words(1:10)

...ERROR...
Could not open file sonnets.txt. No such file or directory.

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

sonnets = string(fileread('sonnets.txt'));

punctuationCharacters = ["." "?" "!" "," ";" ":"];
sonnets = replace(sonnets,punctuationCharacters," ");
words = split(join(sonnets));
words(strlength(words)<5) = [];
words = lower(words);

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

fig2plotly(gcf);

"To be inmplemented soon"

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)

...ERROR...
Unable to find file or directory 'sonnetsTable'.  It is found in 
matlab/CreateWordCloudFromTableExample'.

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.

load sonnetsTable

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

fig2plotly(gcf);

"To be inmplemented soon"

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")

...ERROR...
Unable to open file 'sonnets.txt' for reading: No such file or directory.

Display the words from the sonnets in a word cloud.

str = extractFileText("sonnets.txt");

figure
wordcloud(str);

fig2plotly(gcf);

"To be inmplemented soon"