English dictionary dump for text analysis - python-3.x

I am looking for an English Dictionary dump for some text analysis in Python.
This would include a word and some of its attributes (noun/verb, its forms, tenses, and probably origin too!). So, I envision these as columns of a data frame.
I have gone through numerous threads where folks have suggested some sources but I believe none of those fulfill the above requirements (some are just word lists, others are words with just meanings). Moreover, they kind of look non-exhaustive (very small corpus whereas I am targeting to have ~500000 words).
Is there a dump available from authoritative sources like Oxford or Merriam Webster?
Also, there is a PyDictionary module. Is it possible to fetch such a dump from this module?

WordNet is a corpus of words, their synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms, grouped by synsets and made available for free give that you follow their license. https://wordnet.princeton.edu/. Since this is a popular choice, you can find this corpus in almost any data format with a little searching. Database contains 155,327 words.
BabelNet is another corpus that have aggregated WordNet, Wikipedia, and many other sources into a database of 91,218,220 glossary definitions covering many languages. https://babelnet.org/
If you want to use the Oxford dictionary and Merriam Webster, they are commercial products who dont throw around their database with unlimited access. Both have API interfaces you can gain access to with a registered API key.

Related

semantic similarity for mix of languages

I have a database of several thousands of utterances. Each record (utterance) is a text representing a problem description, which a user has submitted to a service desk. Sometimes also the service desk agent's response is included. The language is highly technical, and it contains three types of tokens:
words and phrases in Language 1 (e.g. English)
words and phrases in Language 2 (e.g. French, Norwegian, or Italian)
machine-generated output (e.g. listing of files using unix command ls -la)
These languages are densely mixed. I often see that in one conversation, a sentence in Language 1 is followed by Language 2. So it is impossible to divide the data into two separate sets, corresponding to utterances in two languages.
The task is to find similarities between the records (problem descriptions). The purpose of this exercise is to understand whether some bugs submitted by users are similar to each other.
Q: What is the standard way to proceed in such a situation?
In particular, the problem lies in the fact that the words come from two different corpora (corpuses), while in addition, some technical words (like filenames, OS paths, or application names) will not be found in any.
I don't think there's a "standard way" - just things you could try.
You could look into word-embeddings that are aligned between langauges – so that similar words across multiple languages have similar vectors. Then ways of building a summary vector for a text based on word-vectors (like a simple average of all a text's words' vectors), or pairwise comparisons based on word vectors (like "Word Mover's Distance"), may still work with mixed-language texts (even mixes of languages within one text).
That a single text, presumably about a a single (or closely related) set of issues, has mixed language may be a blessing rather than a curse: some classifiers/embeddings you train from such texts might then be able to learn the cross-language correlations of words with shared topics. But also, you could consider enhancing your texts with extra synthetic auto-translated text, for any monolingual ranges, to ensure downstream embeddings/comparisons get closer to your ideal of language-obliviousness.
Thank you for the suggestions. After several experiments I developed a method which is simple and works pretty well. Rather than using existing corpora, I created my own corpus based on all the utterances available in my multilingual database. Without translating them. The database has 130,000 utterances, including 3,5 million of words (in three languages: English, French and Norwegian) and 150,000 unique words. The phrase similarity based on the meaning space constructed this way works surprisingly well. I have tested this method on production and the results are good. I also see a lot of space for improvement, and will continue to polish it. I also wrote this article An approach to categorize multi-lingual phrases, describing all the steps in more detail. Critics or improvements welcome.

Given a list of dozens of words, how do I find the best matching sections from a corpus of hundreds of texts?

Let’s say I have a list of 250 words, which may consist of unique entries throughout, or a bunch of words in all their grammatical forms, or all sorts of words in a particular grammatical form (e.g. all in the past tense). I also have a corpus of text that has conveniently been split up into a database of sections, perhaps 150 words each (maybe I would like to determine these sections dynamically in the future, but I shall leave it for now).
My question is this: What is a useful way to get those sections out of the corpus that contain most of my 250 words?
I have looked at a few full text search engines like Lucene, but am not sure they are built to handle long query lists. Bloom filters seem interesting as well. I feel most comfortable in Perl, but if there is something fancy in Ruby or Python, I am happy to learn. Performance is not an issue at this point.
The use case of such a program is in language teaching, where it would be nice to have a variety of word lists that mirror the different extents of learner knowledge, and to quickly find fitting bits of text or examples from original sources. Also, I am just curious to know how to do this.
Effectively what I am looking for is document comparison. I have found a way to rank texts by similarity to a given document, in PostgreSQL.

list of english verbs and their tenses, various forms, etc

Is there a huge CSV/XML or whatever file somewhere that contains a list of english verbs and their variations (e.g sell -> sold, sale, selling, seller, sellee)?
I imagine this will be useful for NLP systems, but there doesn't seem to be a listing anywhere, or it could be my terrible googling skills. Does anybody have a clue otherwise?
Consider Catvar:
A Categorial-Variation Database (or Catvar) is a database of clusters of uninflected words (lexemes) and their categorial (i.e. part-of-speech) variants. For example, the words hunger(V), hunger(N), hungry(AJ) and hungriness(N) are different English variants of some underlying concept describing the state of being hungry. Another example is the developing cluster:(develop(V), developer(N), developed(AJ), developing(N), developing(AJ), development(N)).
I am not sure what you are looking for but I think WordNet -- a lexical database for the English language -- would be a good place to start. Read more at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
The link I referred to you says that
WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Considering getting a dump of wiktionary and extracting this information out of it.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sell mentions many of the forms of the word (sells, selling, sold).
If your aim is simply to normalize words to some base canonical form, considering using a lemmatizer or stemmer. Trying playing with morpha which is a really good english lemmatizer.

associated words

I am developing a program but stuck on a particular hurdle. I need to find words associated with other words. EG "green" might be associated with "environment", "leaf", "earth", "wind", "electric", "hybrid", etc. All I can find is Google Sets. Is there any other resource that is better?
If you have a large text collection (say Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg) you can use co-occurrence scores extract this kind of data. See e.g. Padó and Lapata and the references therein.
I recently built a tool that mines this kind of associations from Wikipedia database dumps by another method. It requires a lot of memory though; other folks have tried to do the same using randomized methods.
If you're still looking for a resource of semantically related words, I've just recently developed an API that takes a query and returns semantically related words. It offers parts of speech, relationships to the query word, and a word similarity measurement.
https://kiingo.co/rapid-associations-api
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of this API.

Synonym style text lookup and parsing

We have a client who is looking for a means to import and categorize a large amount of textual data. This data has to be categorized and it's been suggested that the easiest way to to do this would be to look at the description field and try to match the words held there to see if a category can be derived for that particular record.
It was thought the best way to do this would be matching the words to key words held against each category and if that was unsuccessful then to use some kind of synonym look up to see if this could be used instead. So for example, if a particular record had the word "automobile" in it then a synonym look up could match that word to the word "car" which would be held against the category "vehicle".
Does anyone know of a web service or other means of looking up a dictionary to find synonyms for a particular word? The project manager has suggested buying a Google Enterprise Search license for this but from what I can make out that doesn't offer what these guys are looking for.
Any suggestions of other getting the client what they are looking for would be gratefully accepted.
Thanks! I'll look into Wordnet.
Do you know of any other types of textual classification software products out there. I see there's some discussion of using Bayasian algorithms for this but I can't see any real world examples of it.
The first thing that comes to mind is Wordnet. Wordnet is a human-generated database of words and related words, including synonyms. The Wikipedia Wordnet entry lists several interfaces to Wordnet. I believe some of them are web services.
You can also roll your own. Manning and Schutze's chapter 5 (free PDF) shows ways to do this.
Having said that, are you solving the right problem? How do you build the category list?
Is it a hierarchy? a tag cloud? See Clay Shirky's Ontology is Overrated for a critique of hierarchical categories. I believe that synonyms are less important if you base your classification on sets of words (Naive Bayes, for example) rather than on single words.
You should look at using WordNet. You can visit their website http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ to get more information, but there are libraries available for integrating against them in lots of languages.
Go to their online tool to see the use of it in action here: http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn. If you look up a word, then click on "S" next to each definition, you'll get a list of semantically related words to that definition.
I also think you should check out software that will allow you to perform "document clustering." Here is an example: http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/cluto/cluto/overview. That should help you bootstrap the category creation process.
I think this will help get you a long way toward what you want!
For text classification you can take a look at Apache Mahout.

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