Error in creating TermDocumentMatrix using tm package in R

Question

I am unable to create a term document matrix using tm package in R which throws the following error as I try to create one out of a preprocessed corpus.

Error in UseMethod("TermDocumentMatrix", x) : 
  no applicable method for 'TermDocumentMatrix' applied to an object of class 
"character"

Below is my script that I am using. I am using R v3.4.1 with tm package v0.7-1.

data <- readLines("Data/en_US/en_US_sample.txt", n = 100)
data <- Corpus(VectorSource(data))
data <- tm_map(data, removePunctuation)
data <- tm_map(data, removeNumbers)
data <- tm_map(data, content_transformer(tolower))
data <- tm_map(data, removeWords, stopwords("en"))
data <- tm_map(data, stripWhitespace)
words <- TermDocumentMatrix("data")

I believe TermDocumentMatrix requires the corpus to be in some specified text document format so I tried coercing my corpus to PlainTextDocument using tm_map but it doesn't solve the problem. When I am loading the my text data using Corpus on VectorSource, object created shows the class as SimpleCorpus which might be the problem but I am not totally sure.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Manuel Bickel Manuel Bickel · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-26T07:51:34

You did everything right, just in your last line you accidentally passed a character "data" (note the quotation marks) to the function TermDocumentMatrix() instead of the object data.

Error in creating TermDocumentMatrix using tm package in R

1 Answers