.. meta::
   :description: Orange Textable documentation, from segmentations to tables
   :keywords: Orange, Textable, documentation, segmentation, table

From segmentations to tables
============================

The main purpose of Orange Textable is to build tables based on texts. Central
to this process are the segmentations we have learned to create and manipulate
earlier. Indeed, Orange Textable provides a number of
:doc:`widgets for table construction <table_construction_widgets>`, and they
all operate on the basis of one or more segmentations.

For the time being, we will focus on the construction of frequency tables,
which are very common in computerized text analysis and which will serve as
introduction to other types of tables. For the sake of simplicity, consider
first the segmentation of *a simple example* into letters. Counting the
frequency of each letter type yields a table such as the following:

.. _segmentations_tables_table1:

.. csv-table:: Table 1: Frequency of letter types.
    :header: *a*, *s*, *i*, *m*, *p*, *l*, *e*, *x*
    :stub-columns: 0
    :widths: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

    2,   1,   1,   2,   2,   2,   3,   2

More often, we will be interested in comparing frequency across several
*contexts*. For instance, if the word segmentation of *a simple example* is
also available, it may be used together with the letter segmentation to
produce a so-called *contingency table* (or *document--term matrix*):

.. _segmentations_tables_table2:

.. csv-table:: Table 2: Frequency of letters within words.
    :header: "", *a*, *s*, *i*, *m*, *p*, *l*, *e*, *x*
    :stub-columns: 1
    :widths: 10 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

    *a*,       1,   0,   0,   0,   0,   0,   0,   0
    *simple*,  0,   1,   1,   1,   1,   1,   1,   0
    *example*, 1,   0,   0,   1,   1,   1,   2,   1

In a real application, rows could correspond to the writings of an author and
columns to selected prepositions, for instance. The general idea is to
determine the number of occurrences of various *units* in various *contexts*.
Such data can then be further analyzed, typically by means of a statistical
test (aiming at answering the question "does the distribution of units depend
on contexts") or a graphical representation (making it possible to visualize
the attraction or repulsion between specific units and contexts).

See also
--------
 
* :doc:`Reference: Table construction widgets <table_construction_widgets>`