Stop Lists

Controller > stop lists

Stop lists are lists of words which you don't want to include in analysis. For example you might want to make a word list or analyse key words excluding common function words like the, of, was, is, it.

To use stop lists, you first prepare a file, using Notepad or any plain text word processor, which specifies all the words you wish to ignore. Separate each word using commas, or else place each one on a new line. You can use capital letters or lower-case as you prefer. You can use a semi-colon for comment lines.

There is a file called stoplist.stp (in your \wsmith4 folder) which you could use as a basis and save under a new name.

Example

; My stop list for test purposes.

THE,THIS,IS

IT

WILL

Then select Stop List in the menu to specify the stop list(s) you wish to use. Separate stop lists can be used for the WordList and KeyWords programs. If the stop list is activated, it is in effect: that is, the words in it will be stopped from being included in a word list. If you wish always to use the same stop list(s) you can specify them in wordsmith.ini as defaults.

See Match List for a more detailed explanation, with screenshots.

Another method of making a stop list file is to use WordList on a large corpus of text, setting a high minimum frequency if you want only the high-frequency words. Then save it as a text file. Next, use the Text Converter to format it, using stoplist.cod as the Conversion file.

See also: Making a Tag File, Match List, Lemmatisation.