Histogram based on frequent/common words

Question

I am trying to create a histogram based on frequent/common words, but I only get errors when running the code. I managed to find the 10 most common words, but I can't visualize it in a histogram.

description_list = df['description'].values.tolist()

from collections import Counter
Counter(" ".join(description_list).split()).most_common(10)

#histogram 
plt.bar(x, y)
plt.title("10 most frequent tokens in description")
plt.ylabel("Frequency")
plt.xlabel("Words")
plt.show

Answer 1

It looks like this missed a few things:

1. The result of Counter(...).most_common(10) was not assigned to x or y
2. x, y appear to be unbound
3. plt.show was not invoked, so it either does nothing or prints something like <function show at 0x...>

Here's a reproducible example that fixes these:

from collections import Counter
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

data = {
    "description": [
        "This is the first example",
        "This is the second example",
        "This is similar to the first two",
        "This exists add more words"
    ]
}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)


description_list = df['description'].values.tolist()

# Assign the Counter instance `most_common` call to a variable:
word_frequency = Counter(" ".join(description_list).split()).most_common(10)

# `most_common` returns a list of (word, count) tuples
words = [word for word, _ in word_frequency]
counts = [counts for _, counts in word_frequency]

plt.bar(words, counts)
plt.title("10 most frequent tokens in description")
plt.ylabel("Frequency")
plt.xlabel("Words")
plt.show()

With expected output: