# Text Similarity - Cosine - Control. Suggestion to another / better method?

I would like to ask you, if anybody could check my code, because it was behaving weird - not working, giving me errors to suddenly working without changing anything - the code will be at the bottom.

Background: So my goal is to calculate text similarity [cosine, for now] between annual statements given by several countries at the UN General Assembly [on kaggle dataset]. More specifically find similarity between statement x and statement y in given year and do it for all 45 years. So I can make a graph for its evolution.

How I went about it: So [im novice] I decided to do the work in several steps - finding the similarity of statements of country A to country B first, and then re-doing the work for other countries (country A stays, everything is to country A).

So I filtered statements for Country A, arranged by year. Did text-preprocessing (tokenization, to lower, stopwords, lemenization, bag-of-words). And then I made a TF-IDF matrix from it - named: text.tokens.tfidf

I did the same process for Country B, and got text.tokensChina.tfidf - just replacing all text.tokens to text.tokensChina on new paper. So each matrix contains tf-idf of annual statements from 1971 - 2005, where Rows = documents (years) and columns = terms.

Calculating cosine similarity: So I decided to use Text2Vec as is described here - however, I did not define common space and project documents to it - dunno if it's crucial. And then decided to text two functionssim2 and psim2 since I did not know the difference in parallel.

What was wrong at the start: When first running the functions, I was getting an error, probably telling me, that my lengths of columns in the two TF-IDF matrixes are not matched:

ncol(x) == ncol(y) is not TRUE

However, re-running the code for all my steps and then trying again, it worked, but I did not change anything ...

Results: Result for the function sim2 is weird table [1:45, 1:45]. Clearly not what I wanted - one column with the similarity between the speech of Country A and country B in given year.

Result for the function psim2 is better - one column with the results [not sure, how right they are though].

Technical questions: Using Psim2 is what I wanna - Not I see that sim2 created something like correlation heat map, my bad. But why is the Psim2 function working, even when the length of columns is different (picture)? Also, did I not do anything wrong, especially when I did not create a common space?

Code, picture:

    # *** Text Pre-Processing with Quanteda ***
# 1. Tokenization
text.tokens <- tokens(docs\$text, what = 'word',
remove_numbers = TRUE,
remove_punct = TRUE,
remove_symbols = TRUE,
remove_hyphens = TRUE)

# 2. Transform words to lower case
text.tokens <- tokens_tolower(text.tokens)

# 3. Removing stop-words (Using quanteda's built-in stopwords list)
text.tokens <- tokens_select(text.tokens, stopwords(),
selection = 'remove')
# 4. Perform stemming on the tokens.
text.tokens <- tokens_wordstem(text.tokens, language = 'english')

# 5. Create bag-of-words model / document feature(frequance)
text.tokens.dfm <- dfm(text.tokens, tolower = FALSE)

# 6. Transform to a matrix to work with and inspect
text.tokens.matrix <- as.matrix(text.tokens.dfm)
dim(text.tokens.matrix)

# *** Doing TF-IDF ***
# Defining Function for calculating relative term frequency (TF)
term.frequency <- function(row) {
row / sum(row)
}
# Defining Function for calculating inverse document frequency (IDF)
inverse.doc.freq <- function(col) {
corpus.size <- length(col)
doc.count <- length(which(col > 0))

log10(corpus.size / doc.count)
}
# Defining function for calculating TD-IDF
tf.idf <- function(tf, idf) {
tf * idf
}

# 1. First step, normalize all documents via TF.
text.tokens.df <- apply(text.tokens.matrix, 1, term.frequency)
dim(text.tokens.df)

# 2. Second step, calculate the IDF vector
text.tokens.idf <- apply(text.tokens.matrix, 2, inverse.doc.freq)
str(text.tokens.idf)

# 3. Lastly, calculate TF-IDF for our corpus
# Apply function on columns, because matrix is transposed from TF function
text.tokens.tfidf <- apply(text.tokens.df, 2, tf.idf, idf = text.tokens.idf)
dim(text.tokens.tfidf)

# Now, transpose the matrix back
text.tokens.tfidf <- t(text.tokens.tfidf)
dim(text.tokens.tfidf)

# Cosine similarity using Text2Vec
similarity.sim2 <- sim2(text.tokensChina.tfidf, text.tokensChina.tfidf, method = "cosine", norm = "none")

similarity.psim2 <- psim2(text.tokensChina.tfidf, text.tokensChina.tfidf, method = "cosine", norm = "none")
similarity.psim2 <- as.data.frame(similarity.psim2)


Global Environment picture: Picture of my screen with Global Environment + Psim2 Results