This is your second post, and you've already become one of my favorites. Have a nlp question for you. I noticed you're doing: {"Prismatic" {"runs" 1},"runs" {"on" 1},      "on" {"coffee" 1}} Why do you care to have a count of each word that follows and not assume its always one. Why not just analyze a simple bi-gram as key and an int to keep the count as value?