I'm working on a problem that at the very least seems to require named entity recognition, but I'm not sure how to go farther than the NER parse. What I'm trying to do is parse information (likely from tweets) regarding scheduling of events. So, for example, I'd like to be able to automatically resolve the yes/no answer to the question of "Are The Beatles playing tomorrow?" from short messages like:
"The Beatles cancelled their show tomorrow" or
"The Beatles' show is still on tomorrow"
I know NER will get me close as it will identify the band of interest and the time (if it's indicated), but there are many ways to express the concepts I'm interested in, for example:
"The Beatles are on for tomorrow" or
"The Beatles won't be playing tomorrow."
How can I go from an NER parsed representation to extracting the information of interest? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
I guess you should search by event detection (optionally - in Twitter); maybe, also by question answering systems, if your example with yes/no questions wasn't just an illustration: if you know user needs in advance, this information may increase the quality of the system.
For start, there are some papers about event detection in Twitter: here and here.
As a baseline, you can create a list with positive verbs for your domain (to be, to schedule) and negative verbs (to cancel, to delay) - just start from manual list and expand it by synonyms from some dictionary, e.g. WordNet. Also check for negations - again, by presence of pre-specified words ('not' in different forms) in a tweet. Then, if there is a negation, you just invert the meaning.
Since you work with Twitter and most likely there would be just one event mentioned in a tweet, it can work pretty well.
Related
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this but, i am trying to build a bot in Python that will read incoming messages on a Slack channel where customer post their issues such as 'unable to connect to VPN', 'can someone reply to my ticket' etc…
The bot will analyze the message, determine if the customer is angry or not, and then propose a solution until an agent is free to actually check the issue.
Now, I was experimenting with TextBlob for the sentiment analysis part, but I don't know which technologies to actually use to determine the issue based on specific keywords and provide a solution to the user. Can someone propose me some python libraries/technologies that I could use to achieve this ?
To be honest your question is to generic to answer in one go.
Nontheless, you first have to clearly define the scope of your project. In doing so, you might want to first do a quick literaty review (Google Scholar) to familiarize with the state of the art technologies and methods.
From my little experience, a common (maybe simple) technique (lexicon-based approach) used to determine the sentiment of a word, is to use a pre-compiled dictionary (you can create your own though) that contains words - sentiment mappings. For example:
word:tired, sentiment:negative, score:5
So each time the bot finds the keyword "tired" in a sentence it will assign its corresponding negative value (polarity) to the sentence.
You might want to consider applying POS tags in the input text, as sometimes nouns or ``verbs carry significant meaning, compared to adjectives for example.
Keep in mind though, that negative comments can be written in the form of sarcasm. Sarcasm detectioin is a more difficult task though.
Alternatively, you could try using a pre-trained model such as bert-base-multilingual-uncased-sentiment that can be found here in Hugging Face.
For more information on the matter you have a look at this post.
Again as I mentioned, you have to clearly define your goals. This will enable you to specify the libraries or methodology available to solve your problem. Hope my answer helps.
I'm trying to ascertain the "right tool for the job" here, and I believe Cognitive Services can do this but without disappearing down an R&D rabbit-hole I thought I'd make sure I was tunnelling in the right direction first.
So, here is the brief:
I have a collection of known existing phrases which I want to look for, but these might be written in slightly different ways, be that grammar or language.
I want to be able to parse a (potentially large) volume of text to scan and look for those phrases so that I can identify them.
For example, my phrase could be "the event will be in person" but that also needs to identify different uses of language; for example "in-person event", "face to face event", or "on-site event" - as well as the various synonyms and variations you can get with such things.
LUIS initially appeared to be the go-to tool for this kind of thing, and includes the ability to write your own Features (aka Phrase Lists) to augment the model, but it isn't clear whether that would hit the brief - LUIS appears to be much more about "intent" and user interaction (for example building a chat Bot, or understanding intent from emails).
Text Analytics also seems a likely candidate, but again seems more focused about identifying "entities" (such as people / places / organisations) rather than a natural language "phrase" - would this tool work if I was defining my own "Topics" or is that really just barking up the wrong tree?
.. or ... is there actually something else I should be looking at completely different?
At this point - I'm really looking for a "which tool should I spend lots of time learning about".
Thanks all in advance - I appreciate this is a fairly open-ended requirement.
It seems your scenario aligns more with our text analytics service. I was going to recommend Key Phrase Extraction API which evaluates unstructured text and returns a list of key phrases. However, since you require to use known (custom) phrase list, it may not be the solution you're looking for. We currently don't support custom key phrase extraction today, however it's on our roadmap. If interested, we can connect you with the product team to learn more about your scenario.
Updated:
Please try custom NER capability.
I have 20,000 messages (combination of email and live chat) between my customer and my support staff. I also have a knowledge base for my product.
Often times, the questions customers ask are quite simple and my support staff simply point them to the right knowledge base article.
What I would like to do, in order to save my support staff time, is to show my staff a list of articles that may likely be relevant based on the initial user's support request. This way they can just copy and paste the link to the help article instead of loading up the knowledge base and searching for the article manually.
I'm wondering what solutions I should investigate.
My current line of thinking is to run analysis on existing data and use a text classification approach:
For each message, see if there is a response with a link to a how-to article
If Yes, extract key phrases (microsoft cognitive services)
TF-IDF?
Treat each how-to as a 'classification' that belongs to sets of key phrases
Use some supervised machine learning, support vector machines maybe to predict which 'classification, aka how-to article' belongs to key phrase determined from a new support ticket.
Feed new responses back into the set to make the system smarter.
Not sure if I'm over complicating things. Any advice on how this is done would be appreciated.
PS: naive approach of just dumping 'key phrases' into search query of our knowledge base yielded poor results since the content of the help article is often different than how a person phrases their question in an email or live chat.
A simple classifier along the lines of a "spam" classifier might work, except that each FAQ would be a feature as opposed to a single feature classifier of spam, not-spam.
Most spam-classifiers start-off with a dictionary of words/phrases. You already have a start on this with your naive approach. However, unlike your approach a spam classifier does much more than a text search. Essentially, in a spam classifier, each word in the customer's email is given a weight and the sum of weights indicates if the message is spam or not-spam. Now, extend this to as many features as FAQs. That is, features like: FAQ1 or not-FAQ1, FAQ2 or not-FAQ2, etc.
Since your support people can easily identify which of the FAQs an e-mail requires then using a supervised learning algorithm would be appropriate. To reduce the impact of any miss-classification errors, then consider the application presenting a support person with the customer's email followed by the computer generated response and all the support person would have to-do is approve the response or modify it. Modifying a response should result in a new entry in the training set.
Support Vector Machines are one method to implement machine learning. However, you are probably suggesting this solution way too early in the process of first identifying the problem and then getting a simple method to work, as well as possible, before using more sophisticated methods. After all, if a multi-feature spam classifier works why invest more time and money in something else that also works?
Finally, depending on your system this is something I would like to work-on.
I'm embarking on a project for a non-profit organization to help process and classify 1000's of reports annually from their field workers / contractors the world over. I'm relatively new to NLP and as such wanted to seek the group's guidance on the approach to solve our problem.
I'll highlight the current process, and our challenges and would love your help on the best way to solve our problem.
Current process: Field officers submit reports from locally run projects in the form of best practices. These reports are then processed by a full-time team of curators who (i) ensure they adhere to a best-practice template and (ii) edit the documents to improve language/style/grammar.
Challenge: As the number of field workers increased the volume of reports being generated has grown and our editors are now becoming the bottle-neck.
Solution: We would like to automate the 1st step of our process i.e., checking the document for compliance to the organizational best practice template
Basically, we need to ensure every report has 3 components namely:
1. States its purpose: What topic / problem does this best practice address?
2. Identifies Audience: Who is this for?
3. Highlights Relevance: What can the reader do after reading it?
Here's an example of a good report submission.
"This document introduces techniques for successfully applying best practices across developing countries. This study is intended to help low-income farmers identify a set of best practices for pricing agricultural products in places where there is no price transparency. By implementing these processes, farmers will be able to get better prices for their produce and raise their household incomes."
As of now, our approach has been to use RegEx and check for keywords. i.e., to check for compliance we use the following logic:
1 To check "states purpose" = we do a regex to match 'purpose', 'intent'
2 To check "identifies audience" = we do a regex to match with 'identifies', 'is for'
3 To check "highlights relevance" = we do a regex to match with 'able to', 'allows', 'enables'
The current approach of RegEx seems very primitive and limited so I wanted to ask the community if there is a better way to solving this problem using something like NLTK, CoreNLP.
Thanks in advance.
Interesting problem, i believe its a thorough research problem! In natural language processing, there are few techniques that learn and extract template from text and then can use them as gold annotation to identify whether a document follows the template structure. Researchers used this kind of system for automatic question answering (extract templates from question and then answer them). But in your case its more difficult as you need to learn the structure from a report. In the light of Natural Language Processing, this is more hard to address your problem (no simple NLP task matches with your problem definition) and you may not need any fancy model (complex) to resolve your problem.
You can start by simple document matching and computing a similarity score. If you have large collection of positive examples (well formatted and specified reports), you can construct a dictionary based on tf-idf weights. Then you can check the presence of the dictionary tokens. You can also think of this problem as a binary classification problem. There are good machine learning classifiers such as svm, logistic regression which works good for text data. You can use python and scikit-learn to build programs quickly and they are pretty easy to use. For text pre-processing, you can use NLTK.
Since the reports will be generated by field workers and there are few questions that will be answered by the reports (you mentioned about 3 specific components), i guess simple keyword matching techniques will be a good start for your research. You can gradually move to different directions based on your observations.
This seems like a perfect scenario to apply some machine learning to your process.
First of all, the data annotation problem is covered. This is usually the most annoying problem. Thankfully, you can rely on the curators. The curators can mark the specific sentences that specify: audience, relevance, purpose.
Train some models to identify these types of clauses. If all the classifiers fire for a certain document, it means that the document is properly formatted.
If errors are encountered, make sure to retrain the models with the specific examples.
If you don't provide yourself hints about the format of the document this is an open problem.
What you can do thought, is ask people writing report to conform to some format for the document like having 3 parts each of which have a pre-defined title like so
1. Purpose
Explains the purpose of the document in several paragraph.
2. Topic / Problem
This address the foobar problem also known as lorem ipsum feeling text.
3. Take away
What can the reader do after reading it?
You parse this document from .doc format for instance and extract the three parts. Then you can go through spell checking, grammar and text complexity algorithm. And finally you can extract for instance Named Entities (cf. Named Entity Recognition) and low TF-IDF words.
I've been trying to do something very similar with clinical trials, where most of the data is again written in natural language.
If you do not care about past data, and have control over what the field officers write, maybe you can have them provide these 3 extra fields in their reports, and you would be done.
Otherwise; CoreNLP and OpenNLP, the libraries that I'm most familiar with, have some tools that can help you with part of the task. For example; if your Regex pattern matches a word that starts with the prefix "inten", the actual word could be "intention", "intended", "intent", "intentionally" etc., and you wouldn't necessarily know if the word is a verb, a noun, an adjective or an adverb. POS taggers and the parsers in these libraries would be able to tell you the type (POS) of the word and maybe you only care about the verbs that start with "inten", or more strictly, the verbs spoken by the 3rd person singular.
CoreNLP has another tool called OpenIE, which attempts to extract relations in a sentence. For example, given the following sentence
Born in a small town, she took the midnight train going anywhere
CoreNLP can extract the triple
she, took, midnight train
Combined with the POS tagger for example; you would also know that "she" is a personal pronoun and "took" is a past tense verb.
These libraries can accomplish many other tasks such as tokenization, sentence splitting, and named entity recognition and it would be up to you to combine all of these tools with your domain knowledge and creativity to come up with a solution that works for your case.
Help by editing my question title and tags is greatly appreciated!
Sometimes one participant in my corpus of "conversations" will refer to another participant using a nickname, usually an abbreviation or misspelling, but hereafter I'll just say "nicknames". Let's say I'm willing to manually tell my software whether or not I think various possible nicknames are in fact nicknames, but I want software to come up with a list of possible matches between the handle's that identify people, and the potential nicknames. How would I go about doing that?
Background on me and then my corpus: I have no experience doing natural language processing but I'm a competent data analyst with R. My data is produced by 70 teams, each forecasting the likelihood of 100 distinct events occurring some time in the future. The result that I have 70 x 100 = 7000 text files, containing the stream of forecasts participants make and the comments they include with their forecasts. I'll paste a very short snip of one of these text files below, this one had to do with whether the Malian government would enter talks with the MNLA:
02/12/2013 20:10: past_returns answered Yes: (50%)
I hadn't done a lot of research when I put in my previous
placeholder... I'm bumping up a lot due to DougL's forecast
02/12/2013 19:31: DougL answered Yes: (60%)
Weak President Traore wants talks if MNLA drops territorial claims.
Mali's military may not want talks. France wants talks. MNLA sugggests
it just needs autonomy. But in 7 weeks?
02/12/2013 10:59: past_returns answered No: (75%)
placeholder forecast...
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/97456/What-s-the-way-forward-for-Mali
My initial thoughts: Obviously I can start by providing the names I'm looking to match things up with... in the above example they would be past_returns and DougL (though there is no use of nicknames in the above). I wouldn't think it'd be that hard to get a computer to guess at minor misspellings (though I wouldn't personally know where to start). I can imagine that other tricks could be used, like assuming that a string is more likely to be a nickname if it is used much much more by one team, than by other teams. A nickname is more likely to refer to someone who spoke recently than someone who spoke long ago, or not at all on regarding this question. And they should be used in sentences in a manner similar to the way the full name/screenname is typically used in the corpus. But I'm interested to hear about simple approaches, as well as ones that try to consider more sophisticated techniques.
This could get about as complicated as you want to make it. From the semi-linguistic side of things, research topics would include Levenshtein Distance (for detecting minor misspellings of known names/nicknames) and Named Entity Recognition (for the task of detecting names/nicknames in the first place). Actually, NER's worth reading about, but existing systems might not help you much in your domain of forum handles and nicknames.
The first rough idea that comes to mind is that you could run a tokenized version of your corpus against an English dictionary (perhaps a dataset compiled from Wiktionary or something like WordNet) to find words that are candidates for names, then filter those through some heuristics (do they start with the same letters as known full names? Do they have a low Levenshtein distance from known names? Are they used more than once?).
You could also try some clustering or supervised ML algorithms against the non-word tokens. That might reveal some non-"word" tokens that often occur in the same threads as a given username; again, heuristics could help rule out some false positives.
Good luck; sounds like a fun problem - hope I mentioned at least one thing you hadn't already thought of.