On consistency scores in text data with an implementation in R

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a reproducible cleaning process for the text extracted from PDFs using n-gram models. Our approach compares the originally extracted text with the text generated from, or expected by, these models using earlier text as stimulus. To guide this process, we introduce the notion of a consistency score, which refers to the proportion of text that is expected by the model. This is used to monitor changes during the cleaning process, and across different corpuses. We illustrate our process on text from the book Jane Eyre and introduce both a Shiny application and an R package to make our process easier for others to adopt.