Map word ngrams to counts in scala - scala

Question

I'm trying to create a map which goes through all the ngrams in a document and counts how often they appear. Ngrams are sets of n consecutive words in a sentence (so in the last sentence, (Ngrams, are) is a 2-gram, (are, sets) is the next 2-gram, and so on). I already have code that creates a document from a file and parses it into sentences. I also have a function to count the ngrams in a sentence, ngramsInSentence, which returns Seq[Ngram].
I'm getting stuck syntactically on how to create my counts map. I am iterating through all the ngrams in the document in the for loop, but don't know how to map the ngrams to the count of how often they occur. I'm fairly new to Scala and the syntax is evading me, although I'm clear conceptually on what I need!
def getNGramCounts(document: Document, n: Int): Counts = {
for (sentence <- document.sentences; ngram <- nGramsInSentence(sentence,n))
//I need code here to map ngram -> count how many times ngram appears in document
}
The type Counts above, as well as Ngram, are defined as:
type Counts = Map[NGram, Double]
type NGram = Seq[String]
Does anyone know the syntax to map the ngrams from the for loop to a count of how often they occur? Please let me know if you'd like more details on the problem.

Answer 1

If I'm correctly interpreting your code, this is a fairly common task.
def getNGramCounts(document: Document, n: Int): Counts = {
val allNGrams: Seq[NGram] = for {
sentence <- document.sentences
ngram <- nGramsInSentence(sentence, n)
} yield ngram
allNgrams.groupBy(identity).mapValues(_.size.toDouble)
}
The allNGrams variable collects a list of all the NGrams appearing in the document.
You should eventually turn to Streams if the document is big and you can't hold the whole sequence in memory.
The following groupBycreates a Map[NGram, List[NGram]] which groups your values by its identity (the argument to the method defines the criteria for "aggregate identification") and groups the corresponding values in a list.
You then only need to map the values (the List[NGram]) to its size to get how many recurring values there were of each NGram.
I took for granted that:
NGram has the expected correct implementation of equals + hashcode
document.sentences returns a Seq[...]. If not you should expect allNGrams to be of the corresponding collection type.
UPDATED based on the comments
I wrongly assumed that the groupBy(_) would shortcut the input value. Use the identity function instead.
I converted the count to a Double

Answer 2

Appreciate the help - I have the correct code now using the suggestions above. The following returns the desired result:
def getNGramCounts(document: Document, n: Int): Counts = {
val allNGrams: Seq[NGram] = (for(sentence <- document.sentences;
ngram <- ngramsInSentence(sentence,n))
yield ngram)
allNGrams.groupBy(l => l).map(t => (t._1, t._2.length.toDouble))
}