News

sentometrics 0.5.6

• new functions: peakdates()
• modified the purpose of the peakdocs() function and added a peakdates() function to properly handle the entire functionality of extracting peaks
• a series of documentation fixes

sentometrics 0.5.5

• new functions: sentiment_bind(), and to_sentiment()
• defined replacement (of lexicons and names) for a sentolexicons object
• properly handled lag = 1 in the ctr_agg() function, and set weights to 1 by default for n = 1 in the weights_beta() function
• solved single failing test for older R version (3.4.4)
• removed the abind package from Imports
• removed the zoo package from Imports, by replacing the single occurrence of the zoo::na.locf() function by the fill_NAs() helper function (written in Rcpp)
• extended the quanteda::docvars() replacement method to a sentocorpus object
• modified information criterion estimators for edge cases to avoid them turning negative
• dropped the "x" output element from a sentomodel object (for large samples, this became too memory consuming)
• dropped the "howWithin" output element from a sentomeasures object, and simplified a sentiment object into a data.table directly instead of a list
• expanded the do.shrinkage.x argument in the ctr_model() function to a vector argument
• added a do.lags argument to the attributions() function, to be able to circumvent the most time-consuming part of the computation
• imposed a check in the sento_measures() function on the uniqueness of the names within and across the lexicons, features and time weighting schemes
• solved a bug in the measures_merge() function that made full merging not possible
• the n argument in the peakdocs() function can now also be specified as a quantile

sentometrics 0.5.1

• minor modifications to resolve few CRAN issues
• set default value of nCore argument in the compute_sentiment() and ctr_agg() functions to 1
• classed the output of the compute_sentiment.sentocorpus() function as a sentiment object, and modified the aggregate() function to aggregate.sentiment()

sentometrics 0.5.0

• new functions: weights_beta(), get_dates(), get_dimensions(), get_measures(), and get_loss_data()
• renamed following functions: to_global() to measures_global(), perform_agg() to aggregate(), almons() to weights_almon(), exponentials() to weights_exponential(), setup_lexicons() to sento_lexicons(), retrieve_attributions() to attributions(), plot_attributions() to plot.attributions()
• defunct the ctr_merge() function, so that all merge parameters have to be passed on directly to the measures_merge() function
• expanded the use of the center and scale arguments in the scale() function
• added the dateBefore and dateAfter arguments to the measures_fill() function, and dropped NA option of its fill argument
• added a "beta" time aggregation option (see associated weights_beta() function)
• corrected update of "attribWeights" element of output sentomeasures object in required measures_xyz() functions
• added a new attribution dimension ("lags") to the attributions() function, and corrected some edge cases
• made a slight correction to the information criterion estimators
• added a lambdas argument to the ctr_model() function, directly passed on to the glmnet::glmnet() function if used
• omitted do.combine argument in measures_delete() and measures_select() functions to simplify
• expanded set of unit tests, included a coverage badge, and added covr to Suggests
• reimplementation (and improved documentation) of the sentiment calculation in the compute_sentiment() function, by writing part of the code in Rcpp relying on RcppParallel (added to Imports); there are now three approaches to computing sentiment (unigrams, bigrams and clusters)
• replaced the dfm argument in the compute_sentiment() and ctr_agg() functions by a tokens argument, and altered the input and behaviour of the nCore argument in these same two functions
• switched from the quanteda package to the stringi package for more direct tokenisation
• trimmed the list_lexicons and list_valence_shifters built-in word lists by keeping only unigrams, and included same trimming procedure in the sento_lexicons() function
• added a type column "t" to the list_valence_shifters built-in word list, and reset values of the "y" column from 2 to 1.8 and from 0.5 to 0.2
• updated the epu built-in dataset with the newest available series, up to July 2018
• corrected the word 'sparesly' to 'sparsely' in list_valence_shifters[["en"]]
• further shortened project page to the bare essence
• omitted statement printed ('Compute sentiment... Done.') in the compute_sentiment() function
• slightly modified print() generic for a sentomeasures object
• dropped the "tf-idf" option for within-document aggregation in the ctr_agg() function
• the sento_lexicons() function outputs a sentolexicons object, which the compute_sentiment() function specifically requires as an input; a sentolexicons object also includes a "[" class-preserving extractor function
• the attributions() function outputs an attributions object; the plot_attribtutions() function is therefore replaced by the plot() generic
• defunct the perform_MCS() function, but the output of the get_loss_data() function can easily be used as an input to the MCSprocedure() function from the MCS package (discarded from Imports)
• moved the parallel and doParallel packages to Suggests, as only needed (if enacted) in the sento_model() function
• sligthly modified appearance of plotting functions, to drop ggthemes from Imports

sentometrics 0.4.0

• new functions: measures_delete(), nmeasures(), nobs(), and to_sentocorpus()
• renamed following functions: any xyz_measures() to measures_xyz(), extract_peakdocs() to peakdocs()
• dropped do.normalizeAlm argument in the ctr_agg() function, but kept in the almons() function
• inverted order of rows in output of the almons() function to be consistent with Ardia et al. (2017) paper
• renamed lexicons to list_lexicons, and valence to list_valence_shifters
• the stats element of a sentomeasures object is now also updated in measures_fill()
• changed "_eng" to "_en"' in list_lexicons and list_valence_shifters objects, to be in accordance with two-letter ISO language naming
• changed "valence_language" naming to "language" in list_valence_shifters object
• the compute_sentiment() function now also accepts a quanteda corpus object and a character vector
• the add_features() function now also accepts a quanteda corpus object
• added an nCore argument to the compute_sentiment(), ctr_agg(), and ctr_model() functions to allow for (more straightforward) parallelized computations, and omitted the do.parallel argument in the ctr_model() function
• added a do.difference argument to the ctr_model() function and expanded the use of the already existing oos argument
• brought ggplot2 and foreach to Imports

sentometrics 0.3.5

• faster to_global()
• set tolower = FALSE of quanteda::dfm() constructor in compute_sentiment()
• changed intercept argument in ctr_model() to do.intercept for consistency
• proper checks on values of feature columns in sento_corpus() and add_features()

sentometrics 0.3.0

• new functions: diff(), extract_peakdocs(), and subset_measures()
• modified R Depends from 3.4.2 to 3.3.0, and omitted import of sentimentr
• word count per document now determined based on a separate tokenisation
• improved valence shifters search (modified incluce_valence() helper function)
• new option added for within-document aggregation ("proportionalPol")
• now correct pass-through of dfm argument in ctr_agg()
• select_measures() simplified, but toSelect argument expanded
• calculation in to_global() changed (see vignette)
• improved add_features(): regex and non-binary (between 0 and 1) allowed
• all texts and lexicons now automatically to lowercase for sentiment calculation
• (re)translation of built-in lexicons and valence word lists
• small documentation clarifications and fixes
• new vignette and run_vignette.R script
• shortened project page (no code example anymore)

sentometrics 0.2.0

• first public release

sentometrics 0.1.0

• Google Summer of Code 2017 "release" (unstable)

Reference manual