Pre-processing Japanese literature for text analysis

I recently wrote a small script to perform a couple of functions for pre-processing Aozora Bunko texts (text files of public domain, modern Japanese literature and non-fiction) to be used with Western-oriented text analysis tools, such as Voyant, other TAPoR tools, and MALLET. Whereas Japanese text analysis software focuses largely on linguistics (tagging parts of speech, lemmatizing, etc.), Western tools open up possibilities for visualization, concordances, topic modeling, and other various modes of analysis.

Why do these Aozora texts need to be processed? Well, a couple of issues.

1. They contain ruby, which are basically glosses of Chinese characters that give their pronunciation. These can be straightforward pronunciation help, or actually different words that give added meaning and context. While I have my issues with removing ruby, it's impossible to do straightforward tool-based analysis without removing it, and many people who want to do this kind of analysis want it to be removed.
2. The Aozora files are not exactly plain text: they're HTML. The HTML tags and Aozora metadata (telling where the text came from, for example) need to be removed before analysis can be performed.
3. There are no spaces between words in Japanese, but Western text analysis tools identify words by looking at where there are spaces. Without inserting spaces, it looks like each line is one big word. So I needed to insert spaces between the Japanese words.

How did I do it? My approach, because of my background and expertise, was to create a Python script that used a couple of helpful libraries, including BeautifulSoup for ruby removal based on HTML tags, and TinySegmenter for inserting spaces between words. My script requires you to have these packages installed, but it's not a big deal to do so. You then run the script in a command line prompt. The way it works is to look for all .html files in a directory, load them and run the pre-processing, then output each processed file with the same filename, .txt ending, a plain text UTF-8 encoded file.

The first step in the script is to remove the ruby. Helpfully, the ruby is contained in several HTML tags. I had BeautifulSoup traverse the file and remove all elements contained within these tags; it removes both the tags and content.

Next, I used a very simple regular expression to remove everything in brackets - i.e. the HTML tags. This is kind of quick and dirty, and won't work on every file in the universe, but in Aozora texts everything inside a bracket is an HTML tag, so it's not a problem here.

Finally, I used TinySegmenter on the resulting HTML-free text to split the text into words. Luckily for me, it returns an array of words - basically, each word is a separate element in a list like ['word1', 'word2', ... 'wordn'] for n words. This makes my life easy for two reasons. First, I simply joined the array with a space between each word, creating one long string (the outputted text) with spaces between each element in the array (words). Second, it made it easy to just remove the part of the array that contains Aozora metadata before creating that string. Again, this is quick and dirty, but from examining the files I noted that the metadata always comes at the end of the file and begins with the word 底本 ('source text'). Remove that word and everything after it, and then you have a metadata-free file.

Write this resulting text into a plain text file, and you have a non-ruby, non-HTML, metadata-free, whitespace-delimited Aozora text! Although you have to still download all the Aozora files individually and then do what you will with the resulting individual text files, it's an easy way to pre-process this text and get it ready for tool-based (and also your-own-program-based) text analysis.

[Editor's note, August 2021: Back in 2014 when I first posted this tutorial, I said "I'll be uploading this script to Github and will link to it when it's there, because this part of the code is long and complicated." However, that never happened. If you'd like a copy of the code that runs the above process, please contact me. It hasn't been uploaded because I didn't get around to it, not because I'm averse to sharing. If it's helpful for you to see or copy the logic in the processing steps please get in touch.]