I have a corpus that I'm using the tm package on in R (and also mirroring the same script in NLTK in python). I'm working with unigrams, but would like a parser of some kind to combine words commonly co-located to be as if one word---ie, I'd like to stop seeing "New" and "York" separately in my data set when they occur together, and see this particular pair represented as "New York" as if that were a single word, and alongside other unigrams.
What is this process called, of transforming meaningful, common n-grams onto the same footing as unigrams? Is it not a thing? Finally, what would the tm_map look like for this?
mydata.corpus <- tm_map(mydata.corpus, fancyfunction)
And/or in python?