I'm conducting topic modeling analysis on messages from public Telegram groups, super new to this area so just learning.
I've been following this example here (https://towardsdatascience.com/topic-modeling-with-bert-779f7db187e6), and tried swapping out the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm with the one in BERT's documentation util.community_detection (https://www.sbert.net/docs/package_reference/util.html).
When I output the results of the clusters in this example (4899 Telegram messages), I get something that looks like this.
Topic: just a cluster label
Doc: all the messages in that cluster combined together
0: top keywords found via tf-idf
The problem I'm concerned with is that, there are clearly a ton of messages that are basically identical to each other, I've marked them in yellow. A few examples,
Cluster 3: this is just a bunch of "hellos" and variations thereof
Cluster 5: this is just a bunch of "Ok"s, people saying yes / ok
Cluster 7: people just saying thanks and variations on that
Cluster 9: some variations and misspellings of the word "gas"
Cluster 19: just "siap" which I think means "sorry if I already posted"
To a human reader I feel like this type of text should just be excluded from the analysis altogether, the question is how do I detect it.
Since they're already grouped together by the clustering algorithm, the algorithm must have ways to measure the "similarity" between these messages within a cluster. But I don't seem to be able to find these values exposed anywhere or what it's called. Like for example the HDBSCAN algorithm (https://hdbscan.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basic_hdbscan.html#), I skimmed through the doc a few times and didn't find any such property or measure exposed, am I missing something here?
My hypothesis is that for the cases where it's just a word or a short phrase repeated over and over again, this similarity value must be super super high, and I'd just say "clusters whose internal similarity is higher than this threshold are getting thrown out".
Any help & advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Index the corpus of your interest (for e.g. FAISS) just for an idea, example code is below:
def build_index(self):
""":returns an inverted index for the search documents"""
vectors = [self.encode(document) for document in self.documents]
index = faiss.IndexIDMap(faiss.IndexFlatIP(768)) # dimensionality of vector space
# Add document vectors into index after transforming into numpy arrays. IDs should match len(documents)
index.add_with_ids(np.array([vec.numpy() for vec in vectors]), np.array(range(0, len(self.documents))))
return index
Then perform any similarity metric like L2 Euclidean distance or cosine similarity with dot products. Essentially, concept is that once we transform vectors in an n-dimensional space, vectors with similar semantics are grouped together. Therefore, computing similarity is just computing the angle between them and applying a cosine on it. Similar vectors have less angle, therefore higher cosine value & vice-versa.
Check the following topics for your problem.
Cosine Similarity
FAISS
Sentence Vectors (similar to word vectors, but are good for long documents)
Check this repository for a better understanding of sentence vectorization and computing similarity to retrieve top n sentences.
In short,
Create an index file using FAISS for your data of interest.
Compute similarity by calling one of its methods.
Get top n most similar results.
Removing stop words:
Essentially your problem can be attributed to a list of finite stop words. If you can identify ones to some finite value (e.g. some 25) such different key words at max, then the task becomes stop word removal. Please use NLTK / Spacy libraries for easy stop word removal. You can also specify them in a list of strings, write a condition where if a token matches with one of those strings, they’re deleted from downstream processing. Stop words are omitted & is a necessary pre-processing task in NLP. Your task of telegram
data is also similar to Twitter analysis. Check this & this.
Related
I have just started a project in NLP. Suppose I have a graph for each word that shows the polarity distribution of sentiments for that word in different sentences. I want to know what I can use to recognize the feelings of new words? Any other use you have in mind I will be happy to share.
I apologize for any possible errors in my writing. Thanks a lot
Assuming you've got some words that have been hand-labeled with positive/negative sentiments, but then you encounter some new words that aren't labeled:
If you encounter the new words totally alone, outside of contexts, there's not much you can do. (Maybe, you could go out to try to find extra texts with those new words, such as vis dictionaries or the web, then use those larger texts in the next approach.)
If you encounter the new words inside texts that also include some of your hand-labeled words, you could try guessing that the new words are most like the words you already know that are closest-to, or used-in-the-same-places. This would leverage what's called "the distributional hypothesis" – words with similar distributions have similar meanings – that underlies a lot of computer natural-language analysis, including word2vec.
One simple thing to try along these lines: across all your texts, for every unknown word U, tally up the counts all neighboring words within N positions. (N could be 1, or larger.) From that, pick the top 5 words occuring most often near the unknown word, and look up your prior labels, and avergae them together (perhaps weighted by the number of occurrences.)
You'll then have a number for the new word.
Alternatively, you could train a word2vec set-of-word-vectors for all of your texts, including the unknown & know words. Then, ask that model for the N most-similar neighbors to your unknown word. (Again, N could be small or large.) Then, from among those neighbors with known labels, average them together (again perhaps weighted by similarity), to get a number for the previously unknown word.
I wouldn't particularly expect either of these techniques to work very well. The idea that individual words can have specific sentiment is somewhat weak given the way that in actual language, their meaning is heavily modified, or even reversed, by the surrounding grammar/context. But in each case these simple calculate-from-neighbors techniqyes are probably better than random guesses.
If your real aim is to calculate the overall sentiment of longer texts, like sentences, paragraphs, reviews, etc, then you should discard your labels of individual words an acquire/create labels for full texts, and apply real text-classification techniques to those larger texts. A simple word-by-word approach won't do very well compared to other techniques – as long as those techniques have plenty of labeled training data.
I'm using a pre-trained word2vec model (word2vec-google-news-300) to get the embeddings for a given list of words. Please note that this is NOT a list of words that we get after tokenizing a sentence, it is just a list of words that describe a given image.
Now I'd like to get a single vector representation for the entire list. Does adding all the individual word embeddings make sense? Or should I consider averaging?
Also, I would like the vector to be of a constant size so concatenating the embeddings is not an option.
It would be really helpful if someone can explain the intuition behind considering either one of the above approaches.
Averaging is most typical, when someone is looking for a super-simple way to turn a bag-of-words into a single fixed-length vector.
You could try a simple sum, as well.
But note that the key difference between the sum and average is that the average divides by the number of input vectors. Thus they both result in a vector that's pointing in the exact same 'direction', just of different magnitude. And, the most-often-used way of comparing such vectors, cosine-similarity, is oblivious to magnitudes. So for a lot of cosine-similarity-based ways of later comparing the vectors, sum-vs-average will give identical results.
On the other hand, if you're comparing the vectors in other ways, like via euclidean-distances, or feeding them into other classifiers, sum-vs-average could make a difference.
Similarly, some might try unit-length-normalizing all vectors before use in any comparisons. After such a pre-use normalization, then:
euclidean-distance (smallest to largest) & cosine-similarity (largest-to-smallest) will generate identical lists of nearest-neighbors
average-vs-sum will result in different ending directions - as the unit-normalization will have upped some vectors' magnitudes, and lowered others, changing their relative contributions to the average.
What should you do? There's no universally right answer - depending on your dataset & goals, & the ways your downstream steps use the vectors, different choices might offer slight advantages in whatever final quality/desirability evaluation you perform. So it's common to try a few different permutations, along with varying other parameters.
Separately:
The GoogleNews vectors were trained on news articles back around 2013; their word senses thus may not be optimal for an image-labeling task. If you have enough of your own data, or can collect it, training your own word-vectors might result in better results. (Both the use of domain-specific data, & the ability to tune training parameters based on your own evaluations, could offer benefits - especially when your domain is unique, or the tokens aren't typical natural-language sentences.)
There are other ways to create a single summary vector for a run-of-tokens, not just arithmatical-combo-of-word-vectors. One that's a small variation on the word2vec algorithm often goes by the name Doc2Vec (or 'Paragraph Vector') - it may also be worth exploring.
There are also ways to compare bags-of-tokens, leveraging word-vectors, that don't collapse the bag-of-tokens to a single fixed-length vector 1st - and while they're more expensive to calculate, sometimes offer better pairwise similarity/distance results than simple cosine-similarity. One such alternate comparison is called "Word Mover's Distance" - at some point,, you may want to try that as well.
I have been using quanteda for the past couple of months and really enjoy using the package. One question I have is how many rows of a dfm can the textstat_simil function handle before the time to create the similarity matrix becomes too long.
I have a search corpus containing 15 million documents. Each document is a short sentence containing anywhere from 5 to 10 words (the documents sometimes include some 3-4 digit numbers too). I have tokenized this search corpus using character bigrams and created a dfm from it.
I also have another corpus that I call the match corpus. It has a couple hundred documents of similar length, has had the same tokenization, and a dfm created for it also. The aim is to find the closest matching document from the search corpus for each of the match corpus documents.
A combined dfm is made by rbinding the match dfm with the search dfm. The number of unique tokens for the combined dfm is about 1580. I then run textstat_simil on this combined dfm using "cosine" method, "documents" as the margin, and the selection being just one of the match corpus documents for now to test. However, when I run textstat_simil it takes over 5 minutes to run.
Is this sort of volume too much for this type of approach using quanteda?
Cheers,
Sof
In quanteda v1.3.13, we reprogrammed the function for computing cosine similarities so that is more efficient for memory and for storage. However it sounds like you are still trying to get a document-by-document distance matrix (excluding the diagonal) that will be (15000000^2)/2 - 150000000 = 1.124998e+14 cells in size. If you are able to get this to run at all, I'm very impressed with your machine!
For your 1,850 target document set, however, you can narrow this down by using the selection argument.
Also, look for the experimental textstat_proxy() function in v1.3.13, which we created for this sort of problem. You can specify a minimum distance below which a distance will not be recorded, and it returns a distance matrix using a sparse matrix object. This is still experimental because the sparse values are not zeroes, but will be treated as zeroes by any operations on the sparse matrix. (This violates some distance properties - see the discussion here.)
This is probably a fairly basic NLP question but I have the following task at hand: I have a collection of text documents that I need to score against an (English) lexicon of terms that could be 1-, 2-, 3- etc N-word long. N is bounded by some "reasonable" number but the distribution of various terms in the dictionary for various values of n = 1, ..., N might be fairly uniform. This lexicon can, for example, contain a list of devices of certain type and I want to see if a given document is likely about any of these devices. So I would want to score a document high(er) if it has one or more occurrences of any of the lexicon entries.
What is a standard NLP technique to do the scoring while accounting for various forms of the words that may appear in the lexicon? What sort of preprocessing would be required for both the input documents and the lexicon to be able to perform the scoring? What sort of open-source tools exist for both the preprocessing and the scoring?
I studied LSI and topic modeling almost a year ago, so what I say should be taken as merely a pointer to give you a general idea of where to look.
There are many different ways to do this with varying degrees of success. This is a hard problem in the realm of information retrieval. You can search for topic modeling to learn about different options and state of the art.
You definitely need some preprocessing and normalization if the words could appear in different forms. How about NLTK and one of its stemmers:
>>> from nltk.stem.lancaster import LancasterStemmer
>>> st = LancasterStemmer()
>>> st.stem('applied')
'apply'
>>> st.stem('applies')
'apply'
You have a lexicon of terms that I am going to call terms and also a bunch of documents. I am going to explore a very basic technique to rank documents with regards to the terms. There are a gazillion more sophisticated ways you can read about, but I think this might be enough if you are not looking for something too sophisticated and rigorous.
This is called a vector space IR model. Terms and documents are both converted to vectors in a k-dimensional space. For that we have to construct a term-by-document matrix. This is a sample matrix in which the numbers represent frequencies of the terms in documents:
So far we have a 3x4 matrix using which each document can be expressed by a 3-dimensional array (each column). But as the number of terms increase, these arrays become too large and increasingly sparse. Also, there are many words such as I or and that occur in most of the documents without adding much semantic content. So you might want to disregard these types of words. For the problem of largeness and sparseness, you can use a mathematical technique called SVD that scales down the matrix while preserving most of the information it contains.
Also, the numbers we used on the above chart were raw counts. Another technique would be to use Boolean values: 1 for presence and 0 zero for lack of a term in a document. But these assume that words have equal semantic weights. In reality, rarer words have more weight than common ones. So, a good way to edit the initial matrix would be to use ranking functions like tf-id to assign relative weights to each term. If by now we have applied SVD to our weighted term-by-document matrix, we can construct the k-dimensional query vectors, which are simply an array of the term weights. If our query contained multiple instances of the same term, the product of the frequency and the term weight would have been used.
What we need to do from there is somewhat straightforward. We compare the query vectors with document vectors by analyzing their cosine similarities and that would be the basis for the ranking of the documents relative to the queries.
I have the following problem at hand: I have a very long list of words, possibly names, surnames, etc. I need to cluster this word list, such that similar words, for example words with similar edit (Levenshtein) distance appears in the same cluster. For example "algorithm" and "alogrithm" should have high chances to appear in the same cluster.
I am well aware of the classical unsupervised clustering methods like k-means clustering, EM clustering in the Pattern Recognition literature. The problem here is that these methods work on points which reside in a vector space. I have words of strings at my hand here. It seems that, the question of how to represent strings in a numerical vector space and to calculate "means" of string clusters is not sufficiently answered, according to my survey efforts until now. A naive approach to attack this problem would be to combine k-Means clustering with Levenshtein distance, but the question still remains "How to represent "means" of strings?". There is a weight called as TF-IDF weigt, but it seems that it is mostly related to the area of "text document" clustering, not for the clustering of single words. It seems that there are some special string clustering algorithms existing, like the one at http://pike.psu.edu/cleandb06/papers/CameraReady_120.pdf
My search in this area is going on still, but I wanted to get ideas from here as well. What would you recommend in this case, is anyone aware of any methods for this kind of problem?
Don't look for clustering. This is misleading. Most algorithms will (more or less forcefully) break your data into a predefined number of groups, no matter what. That k-means isn't the right type of algorithm for your problem should be rather obvious, isn't it?
This sounds very similar; the difference is the scale. A clustering algorithm will produce "macro" clusters, e.g. divide your data set into 10 clusters. What you probably want is that much of your data isn't clustered at all, but you want to want to merge near-duplicate strings, which may stem from errors, right?
Levenshtein distance with a threshold is probably what you need. You can try to accelerate this by using hashing techniques, for example.
Similarly, TF-IDF is the wrong tool. It's used for clustering texts, not strings. TF-IDF is the weight assigned to a single word (string; but it is assumed that this string does not contain spelling errors!) within a larger document. It doesn't work well on short documents, and it won't work at all on single-word strings.
I have encountered the same kind of problem. My approach was to create a graph where each string will be a node and each edge will connect two nodes with weight the similarity of those two strings. You can use edit distance or Sorensen for that. I also set a threshold of 0.2 so that my graph will not be complete thus very computationally heavy. After forming the graph you can use community detection algorithms to detect node communities. Each community is formed with nodes that have a lot of edges with each other, so they will be very similar with each other. You can use networkx or igraph to form the graph and identify each community. So each community will be a cluster of strings. I tested this approach with some string that I wanted to cluster. Here are some of the identified clusters.
University cluster
Council cluster
Committee cluster
I visualised the graph with the gephi tool.
Hope that helps even if it is quite late.