Alex, To avoid the memory issue, you can directly use a "bag of words" kernel (which corresponds to using the linear kernel on the sparse bag of words matrix Steve suggested). Just a little toy example how this is done for two :
> x1 <- c("how", "to", "grow", "tree") > x2 <- c("where", "to", "go", "weekend", "cinema") > k12 <- length(intersect(x1, x2)) > k12 [1] 1 If you run this for every pair of samples (additionally exploiting the symmetry of the resulting matrix), you will get an L x L matrix of kernel values (where L is the number of samples) without the need of having to store the large bag of words matrix. That's exactly one of the beauties of SVMs, in my humble opinion. Just as a side note: the result above is 1 because there is one overlap in the two bags of words, the word "to". Maybe it is a good idea to remove such unspecific words first and, moreover, to do word stemming, as is the standard in analyses like the one you are aiming at. Best regards, Ulrich -- View this message in context: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/SVM-How-to-use-categorical-attributes-tp4508460p4512034.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.