How to split a text into two meaningful words in R

Question

this is the text in my dataframe df which has a text column called 'problem_note_text'

SSCIssue: Note Dispenser Failureperformed checks / dispensor failure / asked the stores to take the note dispensor out and set it back / still error message says front door is open / hence CE attn reqContact details - Olivia taber 01159063390 / 7am-11pm

df$problem_note_text <- tolower(df$problem_note_text)
df$problem_note_text <- tm::removeNumbers(df$problem_note_text)
df$problem_note_text<- str_replace_all(df$problem_note_text, "  ", "") # replace double spaces with single space
df$problem_note_text = str_replace_all(df$problem_note_text, pattern = "[[:punct:]]", " ")
df$problem_note_text<- tm::removeWords(x = df$problem_note_text, stopwords(kind = 'english'))
Words = all_words(df$problem_note_text, begins.with=NULL)

Now have a dataframe which has a list of words but there are words like

"Failureperformed"

which needs to be split into two meaningful words like

"Failure" "performed".

how do I do this, also the words dataframe also contain words like

"im" , "h"

which do not make sense and have to be removed, I do not know how to achieve this.

Answer 1

Given a list of English words you can do this pretty simply by looking up every possible split of the word in the list. I'll use the first Google hit I found for my word list, which contains about 70k lower-case words:

wl <- read.table("http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/wordlist")$V1

check.word <- function(x, wl) {
  x <- tolower(x)
  nc <- nchar(x)
  parts <- sapply(1:(nc-1), function(y) c(substr(x, 1, y), substr(x, y+1, nc)))
  parts[,parts[1,] %in% wl & parts[2,] %in% wl]
}

This sometimes works:

check.word("screenunable", wl)
# [1] "screen" "unable"
check.word("nowhere", wl)
#      [,1]    [,2]  
# [1,] "no"    "now" 
# [2,] "where" "here"

But also sometimes fails when the relevant words aren't in the word list (in this case "sensor" was missing):

check.word("sensoradvise", wl)
#     
# [1,]
# [2,]
"sensor" %in% wl
# [1] FALSE
"advise" %in% wl
# [1] TRUE