Ruby program that computes the "distance" between two text files as the angle between their word frequency vectors (in radians). This is Ruby version of Erik Demaine's (MIT) docdist8.py

docdist-v0.rb

#!/usr/bin/ruby

def read_file(filename)
    """
    Read the text file with the given filename;
    return a list of the lines of text in the file.
    """
    begin
        f = File.open(filename, "r")
        return f.read()
    rescue
        print "Error opening or reading input file: ", filename
        exit
    end
end

################################################
# Operation 2: split the text line into words ##
################################################
def get_words_from_line_list(text)
    """
    Parse the given text into words.
    Return list of all words found.
    """
    text = text.downcase.gsub(/[^[:alnum:]]/, ' ')
    word_list = text.split
    return word_list
end

###############################################
# Operation 3 : count frequency of each word ##
###############################################
def count_frequency(word_list)
    """
    Return a dictionary mapping words to frequency.
    """
    d = {}
    for new_word in word_list do
        if d.keys.include? new_word then
            d[new_word] = d[new_word] + 1
        else
            d[new_word] = 1
        end
    end
    return d
end

############################################
# compute word frequencies for input file ##
############################################
def word_frequencies_for_file(filename)
    """
    Return dictionary of (word, frequency) pairs of the given file
    """
    line_list = read_file(filename)
    word_list = get_words_from_line_list(line_list)
    freq_mapping = count_frequency(word_list)
    
    print "File ", filename, ":"
    print line_list.length, " lines,"
    print word_list.length, " words,"
    print freq_mapping.length, " distinct words\n"
    
    return freq_mapping
end

def inner_product(d1, d2)
=begin
    Inner product between two vectors, where vectors
    are repeated as dictionaries of (word, freq) pairs.
    Example : inner_product({"and":3, "of":2, "the":5},
                            {"and":4, "in":1, "of":1, "this":2}) = 14.0
=end
    sum = 0.0
    d1.keys.each do |key|
        if d2.keys.include? key then
            sum = sum + d1[key] * d2[key]
        end
    end
    return sum
end

def vector_angle(d1, d2)
    """
    The input is a list of (word, freq) pairs, sorted alphabetically.
    
    Return the angle between these two vectors.
    """
    numerator = inner_product(d1, d2)
    denominator = Math.sqrt(inner_product(d1, d1) * inner_product(d2, d2))
    return Math.acos(numerator/denominator)
end

def main
    if ARGV.length != 2 then
        puts "Usage: docdist.rb filename_1 filename_2"
    else
        filename_1 = ARGV[0]
        filename_2 = ARGV[1]
        sorted_word_list_1 = word_frequencies_for_file(filename_1)
        sorted_word_list_2 = word_frequencies_for_file(filename_2)
        distance = vector_angle(sorted_word_list_1, sorted_word_list_2)
        print "The distance between the documents is: %0.6f (radians)\n" % distance
    end
end

if __FILE__ == $PROGRAM_NAME then
    main
end