Assigning weights to different features in R

Question

Is it possible to assign weights to different features before formulating a DFM in R?

Consider this example in R

str="apple is better than banana" mydfm=dfm(str, ignoredFeatures = stopwords("english"), verbose = FALSE)

DFM mydfm looks like:

docs apple better banana
text1  1      1     1

But, I want to assign weights(apple:5, banana:3) beforehand, so that DFM mydfm looks like:

docs apple better banana
text1  5      1     3

Answer 1

I don't think so, however you can easily do it afterwards:

library(quanteda)
str <- "apple is better than banana"
mydfm <- dfm(str, ignoredFeatures = stopwords("english"), verbose = FALSE)
idx <- which(names(weights) %in% colnames(mydfm))
mydfm[, names(weights)[idx]] <-  mydfm[, names(weights)[idx]] %*% diag(weights[idx])
mydfm
# 1 x 3 sparse Matrix of class "dgCMatrix"
#        features
# docs    apple better banana
#   text1     5      1      3