How to get rid of the punctuation? and check the spelling error - matlab

Question

eliminate punctuation
words split when meeting new line and space, then store in array
check the text file got error or not with the function of checkSpelling.m file
sum up the total number of error in that article
no suggestion is assumed to be no error, then return -1
sum of error>20, return 1
sum of error<=20, return -1
I would like to check spelling error of certain paragraph, I face the problem to get rid of the punctuation. It may have problem to the other reason, it return me the error as below:
My data2 file is :
checkSpelling.m
function suggestion = checkSpelling(word)
h = actxserver('word.application');
h.Document.Add;
correct = h.CheckSpelling(word);
if correct
suggestion = []; %return empty if spelled correctly
else
%If incorrect and there are suggestions, return them in a cell array
if h.GetSpellingSuggestions(word).count > 0
count = h.GetSpellingSuggestions(word).count;
for i = 1:count
suggestion{i} = h.GetSpellingSuggestions(word).Item(i).get('name');
end
else
%If incorrect but there are no suggestions, return this:
suggestion = 'no suggestion';
end
end
%Quit Word to release the server
h.Quit
f19.m
for i = 1:1
data2=fopen(strcat('DATA\PRE-PROCESS_DATA\F19\',int2str(i),'.txt'),'r')
CharData = fread(data2, '*char')'; %read text file and store data in CharData
fclose(data2);
word_punctuation=regexprep(CharData,'[`~!##$%^&*()-_=+[{]}\|;:\''<,>.?/','')
word_newLine = regexp(word_punctuation, '\n', 'split')
word = regexp(word_newLine, ' ', 'split')
[sizeData b] = size(word)
suggestion = cellfun(#checkSpelling, word, 'UniformOutput', 0)
A19(i)=sum(~cellfun(#isempty,suggestion))
feature19(A19(i)>=20)=1
feature19(A19(i)<20)=-1
end

Answer 1

Substitute your regexprep call to
word_punctuation=regexprep(CharData,'\W','\n');
Here \W finds all non-alphanumeric characters (inclulding spaces) that get substituted with the newline.
Then
word = regexp(word_punctuation, '\n', 'split');
As you can see you don't need to split by space (see above). But you can remove the empty cells:
word(cellfun(#isempty,word)) = [];
Everything worked for me. However I have to say that you checkSpelling function is very slow. At every call it has to create an ActiveX server object, add new document, and delete the object after check is done. Consider rewriting the function to accept cell array of strings.
UPDATE
The only problem I see is removing the quote ' character (I'm, don't, etc). You can temporary substitute them with underscore (yes, it's considered alphanumeric) or any sequence of unused characters. Or you can use list of all non-alphanumeric characters to be remove in square brackets instead of \W.
UPDATE 2
Another solution to the 1st UPDATE:
word_punctuation=regexprep(CharData,'[^A-Za-z0-9''_]','\n');