Removing junk sentences - nlp

I have transcripts of phone calls with customers and agents. I'm trying to find promises which were made by an agent to a customer.
I already did punctuation restoration. But there are a lot of sentences that don't have any sense. I would like to remove them from the transcript. Most of them are just a set of not connected words.
I wonder what approach is the best for this task?
My ideas are:
• Use tf idf and word2vec to create vectors from all sentences. After that we can do some kind of anomaly detection e.g. look for and delete vectors that are highly deviated from most other vectors.
• Spam filters. Maybe is it possible to apply spam filters for this task?
• Crate some pattern of part of speech tags that proper sentence must include. For example, any good sentence must include noun + verb. Or we can use for example dependency tokens from spacy.
Examples
Example of a sentence that I want to keep:
There's no charge once sent that you'll get a ups tracking number.
Example of a junk sentence:
Kinder pr just have to type it in again, clock drives bethel.
Another junk sentence:
Just so you have it on and said this is regarding that.

One thing I would try is to treat this as a classification problem (junk vs non-junk). You can train a model based on a labelled set (i.e. you need to label some subset of your dataset) and then classify the rest of the corpus.
You could use a pre-trained language model like Bert and fine-tune it with you labeled set, as in here (https://colab.research.google.com/github/google-research/bert/blob/master/predicting_movie_reviews_with_bert_on_tf_hub.ipynb).
The advantage of using a language model like this is that you don't have to worry too much about linguistic (pre-)processing, meaning you don't have to get the part-of-speech or syntactic structure.
Comments regarding your ideas:
Anomaly detection with tf-idf and word2vec: It depends on the proportion of the junk sentences in your corpus. If they it's more than 15%, I would think that they might not be so anomal. Also, I am assuming your junk sentences come from noisy automatic speech-to-text transcription. I am not sure, to what extent parts of these junk sentences are correctly transcribed and what the effect of the correctly transcribed portion might have on the extent of the anomaly.
If you mean pre-existing spam filters that are trained on spam email, I would guess that the spammyness of emails is quite different from junkiness of your transcripts.
Use POS tags or syntactic structure to manually create rules for valid sentences:
This seems a bit tedious too me and also I am not sure if you will discover all junk with this. For instance, in your junk examples, the syntactic structure does not strike me as too unusal, e.g. "clock drives bethel" might be tagged as , which is quite a common tag sequence. The junkiness in this case comes from the meaning of the words.

Related

Find list of Out Of Vocabulary (OOV) words from my domain spectific pdf while using FastText model

How to find list of Out Of Vocabulary (OOV) words from my domain spectific pdf while using FastText model? I need to fine tune FastText with my domain specific words.
A FastText model will already be able to generate vectors for OOV words.
So there's not necessarily any need to either list the specifically OOV words in your PDF, nor 'fine tune' as FastText model.
You just ask it for vectors, it gives them back. The vectors for full in-vocabulary words, that were trained from relevant training material, will likely be best, while vectors synthesized for OOV words from word-fragments (character n-grams) shared with training material will just be rough guesses - better than nothing, but not great.
(To train a good word-vector requires many varied examples of a word's use, interleaved with similarly good examples of its many 'peer' words – and traditionally, in one unified, balanced training session.)
If you think you need to do more, you should expand your questin with more details about why you think that's necessary, and what existing precedents (in docs/tutorials/papers) you're trying to match.
I've not seen a well-documented way to casually fine-tune, or incrementally expand the known-vocabulary of, an existing FastText model. There would be a lot of expert tradeoffs required, and in many cases simply training a new model with sufficient data is likely to be a safer approach.
Anyone seeking such fine-tuning should have a clear idea of:
what their incremental data might be able to add to an existing model
what process/code will they be using, and why that process/code might be expected to give meaningful results with their specific starting model & new data
how the results of any such process can be evaluated to ensure the extra fine-tuning steps are beneficial compared to alternatives

How does TreeTagger get the lemma of a word?

I am using TreeTagger to get the lemmas of words in Spanish, but I have observed there are too much words which are not transformed as should be. I would like to know how this operations works, if it is done with techniques such as decision trees or machine learning algorithms or it simply contains a list of words with its corresponding lemma. Does someone know it?
Thanks!!
On basis of personal communication via email with H. Schmid, the author of TreeTagger, the answer to your question is:
The lemmatization function is based on the XTAG Project, which includes a morphological analyzer. Within the XTAG project several corpora have been analyzed. Considerung TreeTagger, especially the analysis of the Penn Treebank Corpus seems relevant, since this corpus is the training corpus for the English parameter file of TreeTagger. Considering lemmatization, the lemmata have simply been stored in a lexicon. TreeTagger finally uses this lexicon as a lookup table.
Hence, with TreeTagger you may only retreive the lemmata that are available in the lexicon.
In case you need additional funtionality regarding lemmatization beyond the options in TreeeTagger, you will need a morphological analyzer and, depending on your approach, a suitable training corpus, although this does not seem mandatoriy, since several analyzers perform quite well even when directly applied on the corpus of interest to be analyzed.

NLP: Pre-processing in doc2vec / word2vec

A few papers on the topics of word and document embeddings (word2vec, doc2vec) mention that they used the Stanford CoreNLP framework to tokenize/lemmatize/POS-tag the input words/sentences:
The corpora were lemmatized and POS-tagged with the Stanford CoreNLP (Manning et al., 2014) and each token was replaced with its lemma and POS tag
(http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/131/039/ecp17131039.pdf)
For pre-processing, we tokenise and lowercase the words using Stanford CoreNLP
(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.05368.pdf)
So my questions are:
Why does the first paper apply POS-tagging? Would each token then be replaced with something like {lemma}_{POS} and the whole thing used to train the model? Or are the tags used to filter tokens?
For example, gensims WikiCorpus applies lemmatization per default and then only keeps a few types of part of speech (verbs, nouns, etc.) and gets rid of the rest. So what is the recommended way?
The quote from the second paper seems to me like they only split up words and then lowercase them. This is also what I first tried before I used WikiCorpus. In my opinion, this should give better results for document embeddings as most of POS types contribute to the meaning of a sentence. Am I right?
In the original doc2vec paper I did not find details about their pre-processing.
For your first question, the answer is "it depends on what you are trying to accomplish!"
There isn't a recommended way per say, to pre-process text. To clean a text corpus, usually the first steps are tokenization and lemmatization. Next, to remove not important terms/tokens, you can remove stop-words or even apply POS tags, to be able to remove tokens based on their grammatical category, based on the assumption that some grammatical categories (such as adjectives), do not contain valuable information for modelling a topic for example. But this purely depends on the type of analysis you are going to follow after the pre-processing step.
For you second part of the question, as explained above, tokenisation and lower case tokens, are standard parts of the pre-processing routine. So I also suspect, that regardless of the ML algorithm used later on, your results will be better if you carefully pre-process your data. I am not sure whether POS tags contribute to the meaning of a sentence though.
Hope I provided some valuable feedback to your research. If not you could provide a code sample to further discuss this issue.

What is the best way to split a sentence for a keyword extraction task?

I'm doing a keyword extraction using TD-IDF on a large number of documents. Currenly I'm splitting each sentence based on n-gram. More particularly I'm using tri-gram. However, this is not the best way to split each sentence into ints constituting keywords. For example a noun phrase like 'triple heart bypass' may not always get detected as one term.
The other alternative to chunk each sentence into its constituting elements look to be part of speech tagging and chunking in Open NLP. In this approach phrase like 'triple heart bypass' always gets extracted as a whole but the downside is in TF-IDF the frequency of extracted terms (phrases) dramatically drops.
Does anyone have any suggestion on either or these two approaches or have any other ideas to improve the quality of the keywords?
What is :
the goal of your application ?
--impacts the tokenization rules and defines the quality of your keywords
type of documents?
--chunking is not the same if you have forum data or news article data.
You can implement some boundary recognizer by yourself, or using a statistical model as in openNLP.
The typical pipeline is that you should first tokenize as simple as possible, apply stop words removal (language-dependent), and then if needed POS tagging-based filtering (but this is a costly operation).
other options : java.text.BreakIterator, com.ibm.icu.text.BreakIterator, com.ibm.icu.text.RuleBasedBreakIterator...

word2vec lemmatization of corpus before training

Word2vec seems to be mostly trained on raw corpus data. However, lemmatization is a standard preprocessing for many semantic similarity tasks. I was wondering if anybody had experience in lemmatizing the corpus before training word2vec and if this is a useful preprocessing step to do.
I think it really matters about what you want to solve with this. It depends on the task.
Essentially by lemmatization, you make the input space sparser, which can help if you don't have enough training data.
But since Word2Vec is fairly big, if you have big enough training data, lemmatization shouldn't gain you much.
Something more interesting is, how to do tokenization with respect to the existing diction of words-vectors inside the W2V (or anything else). Like "Good muffins cost $3.88\nin New York." needs to be tokenized to ['Good', 'muffins', 'cost', '$', '3.88', 'in', 'New York.'] Then you can replace it with its vectors from W2V. The challenge is that some tokenizers my tokenize "New York" as ['New' 'York'], which doesn't make much sense. (For example, NLTK is making this mistake https://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/howto/tokenize.html) This is a problem when you have many multi-word phrases.
The current project I am working on involves identifying gene names within Biology papers abstracts using the vector space created by Word2Vec. When we run the algorithm without lemmatizing the Corpus mainly 2 problems arise:
The vocabulary gets way too big, since you have words in different forms which in the end have the same meaning.
As noted above, your space get less sparse, since you get more representatives of a certain "meaning", but at the same time, some of these meanings might get split among its representatives, let me clarify with an example
We are currently interest in a gene recognized by the acronym BAD. At the same time, "bad" is a english word which has different forms (badly, worst, ...). Since Word2vec build its vectors based on the context (its surrounding words) probability, when you don't lemmatize some of these forms, you might end up losing the relationship between some of these words. This way, in the BAD case, you might end up with a word closer to gene names instead of adjectives in the vector space.

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