N-gram Generator
Shingling is a method of determining the degree of similarity between two electronic files by measuring how many n-grams the two have in common. N-grams are sequences of a set number of words that appear in a text file that are created so that the second word of the present n-gram is always the first word of the succeeding n-gram. So n-grams for this phrase, where n=3 (or where we want to generate 'trigrams'):
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
. . . would be:
Now is the
is the time
the time for
time for all
for all good
all good men
good men to
men to come
to come to
come to the
to the aid
the aid of
aid of their
of their party
The idea is to create word groupings that overlap with one another. If you want to generate n-grams download the Win32 version of the N-gram extraction tool on this site: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/lzhang10/ngram.html
Just download the zip file and extract the files to a folder. Save the text file that you want to analyze in the same folder, CTRL + SHIFT and right click in the folder, and select 'Open command window here'. In the command prompt type:
text2ngram -n3 now.txt
. . . 'now.txt' being the name of the file you want to generate n-grams for. You'll get the results shown in this screen grab:
