State of the art language translation toolkit - nlp

I need to translate Spanish tweets into english for my research. I find some toolkit. Among them, Moses is used by some research papers and other emerging toolkits used them as a baseline for evaluation purpose. So i am considering it as a candidate. Also, I found a toolkit from Stanford university called Phrsal, which also seems to be good. The last one I found is from renowned nltk library. It also has a translate package. Every one of them states that they used phrase based statistical machine translation technique along with some other techinques. Now my question is, from a practical or theoretical point of view, which will be best to use for tweets translation. Or google translator api would be the best solution?

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Accuracy: ANNIE vs Stanford NLP vs OpenNLP with UIMA

My work is planning on using a UIMA cluster to run documents through to extract named entities and what not. As I understand it, UIMA have very few NLP components packaged with it. I've been testing GATE for awhile now and am fairly comfortable with it. It does ok on normal text, but when we run it through some representative test data, the accuracy drops way down. The text data we have internally is sometimes all caps, sometimes all lowercase, or a mix of the two in the same document. Even using ANNIE's all caps rules, the accuracy still leaves much to be desired. I've recently heard of Stanford NLP and OpenNLP but haven't had time to extensively train and test them. How do those two compare in terms of accuracy with ANNIE? Do they work with UIMA like GATE does?
Thanks in advance.
It's not possible/reasonable to give a general estimate on performance of these systems. As you said, on your test data the accuracy declines. That's for several reasons, one is the language characteristics of your documents, another is characteristics of the annotations you are expecting to see. Afaik for every NER task there are similar but still different annotation guidelines.
Having that said, on your questions:
ANNIE is the only free open source rule-based NER system in Java I could find. It's written for news articles and I guess tuned for the MUC 6 task. It's good for proof of concepts, but getting a bit outdated. Main advantage is that you can start improving it without any knowledge in machine learning, nlp, well maybe a little java. Just study JAPE and give it a shot.
OpenNLP, Stanford NLP, etc. come by default with models for news articles and perform (just looking at results, never tested them on a big corpus) better than ANNIE. I liked the Stanford parser better than OpenNLP, again just looking at documents, mostly news articles.
Without knowing what your documents look like I really can't say much more. You should decide if your data is suitable for rules or you go the machine learning way and use OpenNLP or Stanford parser or Illinois tagger or anything. The Stanford parser seems more appropriate for just pouring your data, training and producing results, while OpenNLP seems more appropriate for trying different algorithms, playing with parameters, etc.
For your GATE over UIMA dispute, I tried both and found more viral community and better documentation for GATE. Sorry for giving personal opinions :)
Just for the record answering the UIMA angle: For both Stanford NLP and OpenNLP, there is excellent packaging as UIMA analysis engines available via the DKPro Core project.
I would like to add one more note. UIMA and GATE are two frameworks for the creation of Natural Language Processing(NLP) applications. However, Name Entity Recognition (NER) is a basic NLP component and you can find an implementation of NER, independent of UIMA and GATE. The good news is you can usually find a wrapper for a decent NER in the UIMA and GATE. To make it clear let see this example:
OpenNLP NER
A wrapper for OpenNLP NER in GATE
A wrapper for OpenNLP NER in UIMA
It is the same for the Stanford NER component.
Coming back to your question, this website lists the state of the art NERs:
http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=Named_Entity_Recognition_(State_of_the_art)
For example, in the MUC-7 competition, best participant named LTG got the result with the accuracy of 93.39%.
http://www.aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=MUC-7_(State_of_the_art)
Note that if you want to use such a state of are implementation, you may have some issue with their license.

Generating questions from text (NLP)

What approaches are there to generating question from a sentence? Let's say I have a sentence "Jim's dog was very hairy and smelled like wet newspaper" - which toolkit is capable of generating a question like "What did Jim's dog smelled like?" or "How hairy was Jim's dog?"
Thanks!
Unfortunately there isn't one, exactly. There is some code written as part of Michael Heilman's PhD dissertation at CMU; perhaps you'll find it and its corresponding papers interesting?
If it helps, the topic you want information on is called "question generation". This is pretty much the opposite of what Watson does, even though "here is an answer, generate the corresponding question" is exactly how Jeopardy is played. But actually, Watson is a "question answering" system.
In addition to the link to Michael Heilman's PhD provided by dmn, I recommend checking out the following papers:
Automatic Question Generation and Answer Judging: A Q&A Game for Language Learning (Yushi Xu, Anna Goldie, Stephanie Seneff)
Automatic Question Generationg from Sentences (Husam Ali, Yllias Chali, Sadid A. Hasan)
As of 2022, Haystack provides a comprehensive suite of tools to accomplish the purpose of Question generation and answering using the latest and greatest Transformer models and Transfer learning.
From their website,
Haystack is an open-source framework for building search systems that work intelligently over large document collections. Recent advances in NLP have enabled the application of question answering, retrieval and summarization to real world settings and Haystack is designed to be the bridge between research and industry.
NLP for Search: Pick components that perform retrieval, question answering, reranking and much more
Latest models: Utilize all transformer based models (BERT, RoBERTa, MiniLM, DPR) and smoothly switch when new ones get published
Flexible databases: Load data into and query from a range of databases such as Elasticsearch, Milvus, FAISS, SQL and more
Scalability: Scale your system to handle millions of documents and deploy them via REST API
Domain adaptation: All tooling you need to annotate examples, collect user-feedback, evaluate components and finetune models.
Based on my personal experience, I am 95% successful in generating Questions and Answers in my Internship for training purposes. I have a sample web user interface to demonstrate and the code too. My Web App and Code.
Huge shoutout to the developers on the Slack channel for helping noobs in AI like me! Implementing and deploying a NLP model has never been easier if not for Haystack. I believe this is the only tool out there where one can easily develop and deploy.
Disclaimer: I do not work for deepset.ai or Haystack, am just a fan of haystack.
As of 2019, Question generation from text has become possible. There are several research papers for this task.
The current state-of-the-art question generation model uses language modeling with different pretraining objectives. Research paper, code implementation and pre-trained model are available to download on the Paperwithcode website link.
This model can be used to fine-tune on your own dataset (instructions for finetuning are given here).
I would suggest checking out this link for more solutions. I hope it helps.

NLP: Language Analysis Techniques and Algorithms

Situation:
I wish to perform a Deep-level Analysis of a given text, which would mean:
Ability to extract keywords and assign importance levels based on contextual usage.
Ability to draw conclusions on the mood expressed.
Ability to hint on the education level (word does this a little bit though, but something more automated)
Ability to mix-and match phrases and find out certain communication patterns
Ability to draw substantial meaning out of it, so that it can be quantified and can be processed for answering by a machine.
Question:
What kind of algorithms and techniques need to be employed for this?
Is there a software that can help me in doing this?
When you figure out how to do this please contact DARPA, the CIA, the FBI, and all other U.S. intelligence agencies. Contracts for projects like these are items of current research worth many millions in research grants. ;)
That being said you'll need to process it in layers and analyze at each of those layers. For items 2 and 3 you'll find training an SVM on n-tuples (try, 3) words will help. For 1 and 4 you'll want deeper analysis. Use a tool like NLTK, or one of the many other parsers and find the subject words in sentences and related words. Also use WordNet (from Princeton)
to find the most common senses used and take those as key words.
5 is extremely challenging, I think intelligent use of the data above can give you what you want, but you'll need to use all your grammatical knowledge and programming knowledge, and it will still be very rough grained.
It sounds like you might be open to some experimentation, in which case a toolkit approach might be best? If so, look at the NLTK Natural Language Toolkit for Python. Open source under the Apache license, and there are a couple of excellent books about it (including one from O'Reilly which is also released online under a creative commons license).

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Question is maybe ( about 100%) subjective but I need advices. What is best language for natural language processing ? I know Java and C++ but is there easier way to do it. To be more specific I need to process texts from lot of sites and get information.
As I said in comments, the question is not about a language, but about suitable library. And there are a lot of NLP libraries in both Java and C++. I believe you must inspect some of them (in both languages) and then, when you will know all the plenty of available libraries, create some kind of "big plan", how to implement your task. So, here I'll just give you some links with a brief explanation what is what.
Java
GATE - it is exactly what its name means - General Architecture for Text Processing. Application in GATE is a pipeline. You put language processing resources like tokenizers, POS-taggers, morphological analyzers, etc. on it and run the process. The result is represented as a set of annotations - meta information, attached to a peace of text (e.g. token). In addition to great number of plugins (including plugins for integration with other NLP resources like WordNet or Stanford Parser), it has many predefined dictionaries (cities, names, etc.) and its own regex-like language JAPE. GATE comes with its own IDE (GATE Developer), where you can try your pipeline setup, and then save it and load from Java code.
UIMA - or Unstructured Information Management Applications. It is very similar to GATE in terms of architecture. It also represents pipeline and produces set of annotations. Like GATE, it has visual IDE, where you can try out your future application. The difference is that UIMA mostly concerns information extraction while GATE performs text processing without explicit consideration of its purpose. Also UIMA comes with simple REST server.
OpenNLP - they call themselves organization center for open source projects on NLP, and this is the most appropriate definition. Main direction of development is to use machine learning algorithms for the most general NLP tasks like part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, coreference resolution and so on. It also has good integration with UIMA, so its tools are also available.
Stanford NLP - probably best choice for engineers and researchers with NLP and ML knowledge. Unlike libraries like GATE and UIMA, it doesn't aim to provide as much tools as possible, but instead concentrates on idiomatic models. E.g. you don't have comprehensive dictionaries, but you can train probabilistic algorithm to create it! In addition to its CoreNLP component, that provides most wildly used tools like tokenization, POS tagging, NER, etc., it has several very interesting subprojects. E.g. their Dependency framework allows you to extract complete sentence structure. That is, you can, for example, easily extract information about subject and object of a verb in question, which is much harder using other NLP tools.
C++
UIMA - yes, there are complete implementations for both Java and C++.
Stanford Parser - some Stanford's projects are only in Java, others - only in C++, and some of them are available in both languages. You can find many of them here.
APIs
A number of web service APIs perform specific language processing, including:
Alchemy API - language identification, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis and much more! Take a look at their main page - it is quite self-descriptive.
OpenCalais - this service tries to build giant graph of everything. You pass it a web page URL and it enriches this page text with found entities, together with relations between them. For example, you pass it a page with "Steve Jobs" and it returns "Apple Inc." (roughly speaking) together with probability that this is the same Steve Jobs.
Other recommendations
And yes, you should definitely take a look at Python's NLTK. It is not only a powerful and easy-to-use NLP library, but also a part of excellent scientific stack created by extremely friendly community.
Update (2017-11-15): 7 years later there are even more impressive tools, cool algorithms and interesting tasks. One comprehensive description may be found here:
https://tomassetti.me/guide-natural-language-processing/
Python and NLTK
ScalaNLP, which is a Natural Language Processing library written in Scala, seems suitable for your job.
I would recommend Python and NLTK.
Some hints and notes I can pinpoint based on my experience using it:
Python has efficient list, strings handling. You can index lists very efficiently what in natural language should be a fact. Also has nice syntactic delicacies, for example to access the first 100 words of a list, you can index as list[:100] (compare it with stl in c++).
Python serialization is easy and native. The serialization modules make language processing corpus and text handling an easy task, one line of code.(compare it with the several lines using Boost or other libraries of C++)
NLTK provides classes for loading corpus, processing it, tagging, tokenization, grammars parsing, chunking, and a whole set of machine learning algorithms, among other stuff. Also it provides good resources for probabilistic models based on words distribution in text. http://www.nltk.org/book
If learning a new programming language is an obstacle, you can check openNLP for Java http://incubator.apache.org/opennlp/

Natural Language Processing Package

I have started working on a project which requires Natural Language Processing. We have do the spell checking as well as mapping sentences to phrases and their synonyms. I first thought of using GATE but i am confused on what to use? I found an interesting post here which got me even more confused.
http://lordpimpington.com/codespeaks/drupal-5.1/?q=node/5
Please help me decide on what suits my purpose the best. I am working a web application which will us this NLP tool as a service.
You didn't really give much info, but try this: http://www.nltk.org/
I don't think NLTK does spell checking (I could be wrong on this), but it can do parts of speech tagging for text input.
For finding/matching synonyms you could use something like WordNet http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
If you're doing something really domain specific: I would recommend coming up with your own ontology for domain specific terms.
If you are using Python you can develop a spell checker with Python Enchant.
NLTK is good for developing Sentiment Analysis system too. I have some prototypes of the same too
Jaggu
If you are using deep learning based models, and if you have sufficient data, you can implement task specific models for any purpose. With the development of deep leaning based languages models, you can used word embedding based models with lexicon resources to obtain synonyms and antonyms. You can also follow the links below to obtain more resources.
https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/
https://www.nltk.org/
https://wordnet.princeton.edu/

Resources