Bag of Words, TF-IDF, and Text Representation

The Problem

The model needs numbers. You have strings.

Every NLP pipeline has to answer the same question. How do we turn a variable-length stream of tokens into a fixed-size vector that a classifier can consume. The first answer the field landed on was the dumbest one that works. Count the words. Make a vector.

That vector has carried more production NLP than any embedding model. Spam filters, topic classifiers, log anomaly detection, search ranking (before BM25), the first wave of sentiment analysis, the first decade of academic NLP benchmarks. 2026 practitioners still reach for it first on narrow classification tasks. It is fast, interpretable, and often indistinguishable from a 400M-parameter embedding model on tasks where word presence is what matters.

This lesson builds bag of words, then TF-IDF, from scratch. Then shows scikit-learn doing the same in three lines. Then names the failure mode that makes you reach for embeddings.

The Concept

Bag of Words (BoW) throws away order. For each document, count how many times each vocabulary word appears. Vector length is the vocabulary size. Position i is the count of word i.

TF-IDF reweights BoW. A word that appears in every document is uninformative, so scale it down. A word rare across the corpus but frequent in a single document is signal, so scale it up.

\begin{aligned}
\text{TF-IDF}(w, d) &= \text{TF}(w, d) \cdot \text{IDF}(w) \\
&= \frac{\mathop{\mathrm{count}}(w \text{ in } d)}{|d|} \cdot \log\frac{N}{\mathop{\mathrm{df}}(w)}
\end{aligned}

Where TF is term frequency in the document, df is document frequency (how many docs contain the word), N is total documents. The log keeps the weight bounded for ubiquitous words.

Key property: both produce sparse vectors with interpretable axes. You can look at a trained classifier's weights and read which words push a document toward each class. You cannot do this with a 768-dimensional BERT embedding.

bow-tfidf

Build It

Step 1: build the vocabulary

def build_vocab(docs):
    vocab = {}
    for doc in docs:
        for token in doc:
            if token not in vocab:
                vocab[token] = len(vocab)
    return vocab

Input: list of tokenized documents (any word-level tokenizer will do; the code/main.py in this lesson uses a simplified lowercase variant). Output: {word: index} dict. Stable insertion order means word index 0 is the first word seen in the first document. Convention varies; scikit-learn sorts alphabetically.

Step 2: bag of words

def bag_of_words(docs, vocab):
    matrix = [[0] * len(vocab) for _ in docs]
    for i, doc in enumerate(docs):
        for token in doc:
            if token in vocab:
                matrix[i][vocab[token]] += 1
    return matrix

>>> docs = [["cat", "sat", "on", "mat"], ["cat", "cat", "ran"]]
>>> vocab = build_vocab(docs)
>>> bag_of_words(docs, vocab)
[[1, 1, 1, 1, 0], [2, 0, 0, 0, 1]]

Rows are documents. Columns are vocabulary indices. Entry [i][j] is "how many times word j appears in document i." Doc 1 has cat twice because it did. Doc 0 has ran zero times because it did not.

Step 3: term frequency and document frequency

import math


def term_frequency(doc_bow, doc_length):
    return [c / doc_length if doc_length else 0 for c in doc_bow]


def document_frequency(bow_matrix):
    df = [0] * len(bow_matrix[0])
    for row in bow_matrix:
        for j, count in enumerate(row):
            if count > 0:
                df[j] += 1
    return df


def inverse_document_frequency(df, n_docs):
    return [math.log((n_docs + 1) / (d + 1)) + 1 for d in df]

Two smoothing tricks worth naming. The (n+1)/(d+1) avoids log(x/0). The trailing +1 ensures a word in every document still has IDF 1 (not 0), matching scikit-learn's default. Other implementations use raw log(N/df). Both work; the smoothed version is friendlier.

Step 4: TF-IDF

def tfidf(bow_matrix):
    n_docs = len(bow_matrix)
    df = document_frequency(bow_matrix)
    idf = inverse_document_frequency(df, n_docs)
    out = []
    for row in bow_matrix:
        length = sum(row)
        tf = term_frequency(row, length)
        out.append([tf_j * idf_j for tf_j, idf_j in zip(tf, idf)])
    return out

>>> docs = [
...     ["the", "cat", "sat"],
...     ["the", "dog", "sat"],
...     ["the", "cat", "ran"],
... ]
>>> vocab = build_vocab(docs)
>>> bow = bag_of_words(docs, vocab)
>>> tfidf(bow)

Three documents, five vocab words (the, cat, sat, dog, ran). the appears in all three, so its IDF is low. dog appears in one, so its IDF is high. With a real vocabulary of thousands of words, these vectors are sparse (most entries are zero). Even in this toy, the discriminative words pop.

Step 5: L2-normalize rows

def l2_normalize(matrix):
    out = []
    for row in matrix:
        norm = math.sqrt(sum(x * x for x in row))
        out.append([x / norm if norm else 0 for x in row])
    return out

Without normalization, a longer document gets a larger vector and dominates similarity scores. L2 normalization puts every document on the unit hypersphere. Cosine similarity between rows is now just a dot product.

Use It

scikit-learn ships the production version.

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer, TfidfVectorizer

docs = ["the cat sat on the mat", "the dog sat on the mat", "the cat ran"]

bow_vectorizer = CountVectorizer()
bow = bow_vectorizer.fit_transform(docs)
print(bow_vectorizer.get_feature_names_out())
print(bow.toarray())

tfidf_vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer()
tfidf = tfidf_vectorizer.fit_transform(docs)
print(tfidf.toarray().round(3))

CountVectorizer does tokenization, vocabulary, and BoW in one call. TfidfVectorizer adds IDF weighting and L2 normalization. Both return sparse matrices. For 100k documents, the dense version does not fit in memory; stay sparse until the classifier demands dense.

Knobs that change everything:

When TF-IDF still wins (as of 2026)

• Spam detection, topic labeling, log anomaly flagging. Word presence is what matters; semantic nuance does not.
• Low-data regimes (hundreds of labeled examples). TF-IDF plus logistic regression has no pretraining cost.
• Anywhere latency matters. TF-IDF plus a linear model answers in microseconds. Embedding a document through a transformer takes 10-100ms.
• Systems that must explain their predictions. Inspect the classifier's coefficients. Top positive words are the reason.

When TF-IDF fails

The semantic blindness failure. Consider these two documents:

• "The movie was not good at all."
• "The movie was excellent."

One is a negative review. One is positive. Their TF-IDF overlap is exactly {the, movie, was}. A bag-of-words classifier has to memorize that the word not near good flips the label. It can learn this on enough data, but never as gracefully as a model that understands syntax.

The other failure: out-of-vocabulary words at inference. A BoW model trained on IMDb reviews has no idea what to do with Zoomer-approved if that token never appeared in training. Subword embeddings (lesson 04) handle this. TF-IDF cannot.

Hybrid: TF-IDF weighted embeddings

The 2026 pragmatic default for medium-data classification: use TF-IDF weights as attention over word embeddings.

def tfidf_weighted_embedding(doc, tfidf_scores, embedding_table, dim):
    vec = [0.0] * dim
    total_weight = 0.0
    for token in doc:
        if token not in embedding_table or token not in tfidf_scores:
            continue
        weight = tfidf_scores[token]
        emb = embedding_table[token]
        for i in range(dim):
            vec[i] += weight * emb[i]
        total_weight += weight
    if total_weight == 0:
        return vec
    return [v / total_weight for v in vec]

You get semantic capacity from embeddings, and rare-word emphasis from TF-IDF. Classifier trains on the pooled vector. This outperforms either on its own for sentiment, topic, and intent classification below about 50k labeled examples.

Ship It

Save as outputs/prompt-vectorization-picker.md:

---
name: vectorization-picker
description: Given a text-classification task, recommend BoW, TF-IDF, embeddings, or a hybrid.
phase: 5
lesson: 02
---

You recommend a text-vectorization strategy. Given a task description, output:

1. Representation (BoW, TF-IDF, transformer embeddings, or a hybrid). Explain why in one sentence.
2. Specific vectorizer configuration. Name the library. Quote the arguments (`ngram_range`, `min_df`, `max_df`, `sublinear_tf`, `stop_words`).
3. One failure mode to test before shipping.

Refuse to recommend embeddings when the user has under 500 labeled examples unless they show evidence of semantic failure in a TF-IDF baseline. Refuse to remove stopwords for sentiment analysis (negations carry signal). Flag class imbalance as needing more than a vectorizer change.

Example input: "Classifying 30k customer support tickets into 12 categories. Most tickets are 2-3 sentences. English only. Need explainability for audit logs."

Example output:

- Representation: TF-IDF. 30k examples is not small; explainability requirement rules out dense embeddings.
- Config: `TfidfVectorizer(ngram_range=(1, 2), min_df=3, max_df=0.95, sublinear_tf=True, stop_words=None)`. Keep stopwords because category keywords sometimes are stopwords ("not working" vs "working").
- Failure to test: verify `min_df=3` does not drop rare category keywords. Run `get_feature_names_out` filtered by class and eyeball.

Exercises

1. Easy. Implement cosine_similarity(doc_vec_a, doc_vec_b) on the L2-normalized TF-IDF output. Verify that identical documents score 1.0 and disjoint-vocabulary documents score 0.0.
2. Medium. Add n-gram support to bag_of_words. Parameter n produces counts over n-grams. Test that n=2 on ["the", "cat", "sat"] produces bigram counts for ["the cat", "cat sat"].
3. Hard. Build the TF-IDF-weighted-embedding hybrid above using GloVe 100d vectors (download once, cache). Compare classification accuracy against plain TF-IDF and plain mean-pooled embeddings on the 20 Newsgroups dataset. Report which wins where.

Key Terms

Further Reading

• scikit-learn — feature extraction from text — the canonical API reference, plus notes on every knob.
• Salton, G., & Buckley, C. (1988). Term-weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval — the paper that made TF-IDF the default for a decade.
• "Why TF-IDF Still Beats Embeddings" — Ashfaque Thonikkadavan (Medium) — 2026 take on when the old method wins and why.