Peer-graded Assignment: Project Part 2: Describing Algorithms Using a Flowchart

n this course project, we are applying computational thinking to solve the problem of counting the number of occurrences of a word and its synonyms in a corpus of text documents. Solving this problem is a key part of many text analysis tasks such as evaluating the sentiment or mood of a person’s social media content, or summarizing a collection of emails or product reviews.

In Part 1, we applied the pillars of computational thinking to decompose this problem into two smaller problems, and then used pattern recognition to find commonalities between the problems, used data representation and abstraction to identify the data we needed, and developed a simple algorithm.

In this part of the project, you are asked to create the flowchart for this algorithm, going into more depth and detail than we did in Part 1, now that we have explored a variety of common algorithms.

In creating the flowchart, you should use the following terms to represent the data:

Keyword, which is the word to search for
Thesaurus, which is a collection of Entries, each of which consists of a Word and a corresponding collection called Synonyms, which is a collection of one or more Words
Corpus, which is a collection of Documents, each of which is a collection of Words
You should use the results of the computational thinking pillar of decomposition to design your flowchart. In particular, your flowchart should have two major parts:

Finding the synonyms in the the thesaurus
Counting the number of occurrences of the keyword and its synonyms in the corpus
For the first part, the algorithm can be described like this:

Create a collection of search terms and initialize it with the Keyword
Look at each Entry in the Thesaurus; if its Word is the same as the Keyword, then add each Word in the Synonyms to the collection of search terms
Hint: Think about the algorithms we saw earlier in this part of the course and look for similar patterns between those and the one described here.

For the second part of the flowchart, the algorithm can be described like this:

For each target word in the collection of search terms, initialize a counter to 0
Then, look at each Document in the Corpus, and for each Document, look at each Word; if the Word is the same as the target word, increment a counter
Output the target word and the value of its counter
Hint: As above, think about the algorithms we saw earlier in this part of the course and look for similar patterns between those and the one described here.

For simplicity, you may assume that:

The Thesaurus is not empty, i.e., there is at least one Entry in the Thesaurus.
The Corpus is not empty, i.e., there is at least one Document in the Corpus.
Each Document contains at least one Word.
Using the flowchart notation we have seen in the course, and based on the basic operations of iterating over elements of a collection, comparing values, and updating variables that we saw in the flowchart for other algorithms, draw a flowchart for the algorithm to solve this problem. You can draw the flowchart using a tool like draw.io or PowerPoint, or simply do it by hand and take a photo of your work. Create a PDF of your flowchart and upload that as your submission.