Word frequency ignoring stop words

Python data engineering interview problem. Difficulty: intermediate. Pattern: Dictionaries. About 15 minutes. Part of the Pro drill bank.

A knowledge-base search wants word counts from an article but should ignore stop words like 'the' and 'and' so the histogram is actually useful.

Count word frequency in text after removing a provided stop-word list.

Requirements

• Normalize case before comparing to stop words.
• Return counts only for remaining tokens.

Constraints

• Punctuation should not create extra keys.

Examples

Input: word_freq_filtered('The the cat sat', ['the']) Output: {'cat': 1, 'sat': 1} This input follows the stated rules and produces this output.

Topics: lakebench, python, frequency-counting.

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