CountVectorizer throwing ValueError: empty vocabulary; perhaps the documents only contain stop words

Python Help
1

First I clustered my text data and then I combined all the documents that have the same label into a single document. The code to combine all documents is:

docs_df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns=["Doc"])
docs_df['Topic'] = cluster.labels_
docs_df['Doc_ID'] = range(len(docs_df))
docs_per_topic = docs_df.dropna(subset=['Doc']).groupby(['Topic'], as_index = False).agg({'Doc': ' '.join})

Now I want tf-idf and for that, I am using CountVectorizer using the below code:
import numpy as np
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer

def c_tf_idf(documents, m, ngram_range=(1, 1)):
    count = CountVectorizer(ngram_range=ngram_range, stop_words="english").fit(documents)
    t = count.transform(documents).toarray()
    w = t.sum(axis=1)
    tf = np.divide(t.T, w)
    sum_t = t.sum(axis=0)
    idf = np.log(np.divide(m, sum_t)).reshape(-1, 1)
    tf_idf = np.multiply(tf, idf)

    return tf_idf, count
  
tf_idf, count = c_tf_idf(docs_per_topic.Doc.values, m=len(data))

But I am getting the below error:

ValueError Traceback (most recent call last)
in
13 return tf_idf, count
14
—> 15 tf_idf, count = c_tf_idf(docs_per_topic.Doc.values, m=len(data))

in c_tf_idf(documents, m, ngram_range)
3
4 def c_tf_idf(documents, m, ngram_range=(1, 1)):
----> 5 count = CountVectorizer(ngram_range=ngram_range, stop_words=“english”).fit(documents)
6 t = count.transform(documents).toarray()
7 w = t.sum(axis=1)

~/opt/anaconda3/envs/tensorflow/lib/python3.7/site-packages/sklearn/feature_extraction/text.py in fit(self, raw_documents, y)
1184 “”"
1185 self._warn_for_unused_params()
→ 1186 self.fit_transform(raw_documents)
1187 return self
1188

~/opt/anaconda3/envs/tensorflow/lib/python3.7/site-packages/sklearn/feature_extraction/text.py in fit_transform(self, raw_documents, y)
1218
1219 vocabulary, X = self.count_vocab(raw_documents,
→ 1220 self.fixed_vocabulary)
1221
1222 if self.binary:

~/opt/anaconda3/envs/tensorflow/lib/python3.7/site-packages/sklearn/feature_extraction/text.py in _count_vocab(self, raw_documents, fixed_vocab)
1148 vocabulary = dict(vocabulary)
1149 if not vocabulary:
→ 1150 raise ValueError(“empty vocabulary; perhaps the documents only”
1151 " contain stop words")
1152

ValueError: empty vocabulary; perhaps the documents only contain stop words

I tried using split as some forum suggested but that is giving another error.

I would appreciate suggestions or solutions to my problem.

Thank you.

2

Hi Piyush,

I think this issue is something to do with your dataset. There is some preprocessing that happens as part of CountVectorizer before the words are actually counted. By default a ‘word’ is 2 or more alphanumeric characters surrounded by whitespace/punctuation, meaning single letter words get removed. Also, if you choose to remove english stopwords like you have using stopwords='english' (‘the’, ‘is’, ‘and’ etc.) then these words will also be removed. If there are no words left to count after this then CountVectorizer will give the error you are getting.

For example, this will fail as all the words are stripped out in preprocessing:

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer
cv = CountVectorizer().fit(['a', 'b', 'c'])

but this will not fail:

cv = CountVectorizer().fit(['this is a valid sentence that contains words'])
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