Question

This came up in another question but I figured it is best to ask this as a separate question. Give a large list of sentences (order of 100 thousands):

[
"This is sentence 1 as an example",
"This is sentence 1 as another example",
"This is sentence 2",
"This is sentence 3 as another example ",
"This is sentence 4"
]

what is the best way to code the following function?

def GetSentences(word1, word2, position):
    return ""

where given two words, word1, word2 and a position position, the function should return the list of all sentences satisfying that constraint. For example:

GetSentences("sentence", "another", 3)

should return sentences 1 and 3 as the index of the sentences. My current approach was using a dictionary like this:

Index = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(lambda: [])))

for sentenceIndex, sentence in enumerate(sentences):
    words = sentence.split()
    for index, word in enumerate(words):
        for i, word2 in enumerate(words[index:):
            Index[word][word2][i+1].append(sentenceIndex)

But this quickly blows everything out of proportion on a dataset that is about 130 MB in size as my 48GB RAM is exhausted in less than 5 minutes. I somehow get a feeling this is a common problem but can’t find any references on how to solve this efficiently. Any suggestions on how to approach this?

Answer 1

Use database for storing values.

1. First add all the sentences to one table (they should have IDs). You may call it eg. sentences.
2. Second, create table with words contained within all the sentences (call it eg. words, give each word an ID), saving connection between sentences’ table records and words’ table records within separate table (call it eg. sentences_words, it should have two columns, preferably word_id and sentence_id).

3. When searching for sentences containing all the mentioned words, your job will be simplified:

   1. You should first find records from words table, where words are exactly the ones you search for. The query could look like this:

      SELECT `id` FROM `words` WHERE `word` IN ('word1', 'word2', 'word3');
      

   2. Second, you should find sentence_id values from table sentences that have required word_id values (corresponding to the words from words table). The initial query could look like this:

      SELECT `sentence_id`, `word_id` FROM `sentences_words`
      WHERE `word_id` IN ([here goes list of words' ids]);
      

      which could be simplified to this:

      SELECT `sentence_id`, `word_id` FROM `sentences_words`
      WHERE `word_id` IN (
          SELECT `id` FROM `words` WHERE `word` IN ('word1', 'word2', 'word3')
      );
      

   3. Filter the result within Python to return only sentence_id values that have all the required word_id IDs you need.

This is basically a solution based on storing big amount of data in the form that is best suited for this – the database.

EDIT:

1. If you will only search for two words, you can do even more (almost everything) on DBMS’ side.
2. Considering you need also position difference, you should store the position of the word within third column of sentences_words table (lets call it just position) and when searching for appropriate words, you should calculate difference of this value associated with both words.