word2vec lemmatization of corpus before training - nlp

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.

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

Passing multiple sentences to BERT?

I have a dataset with paragraphs that I need to classify into two classes. These paragraphs are usually 3-5 sentences long. The overwhelming majority of them are less than 500 words long. I would like to make use of BERT to tackle this problem.
I am wondering how I should use BERT to generate vector representations of these paragraphs and especially, whether it is fine to just pass the whole paragraph into BERT?
There have been informative discussions of related problems here and here. These discussions focus on how to use BERT for representing whole documents. In my case the paragraphs are not that long, and indeed could be passed to BERT without exceeding its maximum length of 512. However, BERT was trained on sentences. Sentences are relatively self-contained units of meaning. I wonder if feeding multiple sentences into BERT doesn't conflict fundamentally with what the model was designed to do (although this appears to be done regularly).
I think your question is based on a misconception. Even though the BERT paper uses the term sentence quite often, it is not referring to a linguistic sentence. The paper defines a sentence as
an arbitrary span of contiguous text, rather than an actual linguistic sentence.
It is therefore completely fine to pass whole paragraphs to BERT and a reason why they can handle those.

Cluster similar words using word2vec

I have various restaurant labels with me and i have some words that are unrelated to restaurants as well. like below:
vegan
vegetarian
pizza
burger
transportation
coffee
Bookstores
Oil and Lube
I have such mix of around 500 labels. I want to know is there a way pick the similar labels that are related to food choices and leave out words like oil and lube, transportation.
I tried using word2vec but, some of them have more than one word and could not figure out a right way.
Brute-force approach is to tag them manually. But, i want to know is there a way using NLP or Word2Vec to cluster all related labels together.
Word2Vec could help with this, but key factors to consider are:
How are your word-vectors trained? Using off-the-shelf vectors (like say the popular GoogleNews vectors trained on a large corpus of news stories) are unlikely to closely match the senses of these words in your domain, or include multi-word tokens like 'oil_and_lube'. But, if you have a good training corpus from your own domain, with multi-word tokens from a controlled vocabulary (like oil_and_lube) that are used in context, you might get quite good vectors for exactly the tokens you need.
The similarity of word-vectors isn't strictly 'synonymity' but often other forms of close-relation including oppositeness and other ways words can be interchangeable or be used in similar contexts. So whether or not the word-vector similarity-values provide a good threshold cutoff for your particular desired "related to food" test is something you'd have to try out & tinker around. (For example: whether words that are drop-in replacements for each other are closest to each other, or words that are common-in-the-same-topics are closest to each other, can be influenced by whether the window parameter is smaller or larger. So you could find tuning Word2Vec training parameters improve the resulting vectors for your specific needs.)
Making more recommendations for how to proceed would require more details on the training data you have available – where do these labels come from? what's the format they're in? how much do you have? – and your ultimate goals – why is it important to distinguish between restaurant- and non-restaurant- labels?
OK, thank you for the details.
In order to train on word2vec you should take into account the following facts :
You need a huge and variate text dataset. Review your training set and make sure it contains the useful data you need in order to obtain what you want.
Set one sentence/phrase per line.
For preprocessing, you need to delete punctuation and set all strings to lower case.
Do NOT lemmatize or stemmatize, because the text will be less complex!
Try different settings:
5.1 Algorithm: I used word2vec and I can say BagOfWords (BOW) provided better results, on different training sets, than SkipGram.
5.2 Number of layers: 200 layers provide good result
5.3 Vector size: Vector length = 300 is OK.
Now run the training algorithm. The, use the obtained model in order to perform different tasks. For example, in your case, for synonymy, you can compare two words (i.e. vectors) with cosine (or similarity). From my experience, cosine provides a satisfactory result: the distance between two words is given by a double between 0 and 1. Synonyms have high cosine values, you must find the limit between words which are synonyms and others that are not.

Why are word embeddings with linguistic features (e.g. Sense2Vec) not used?

Given that embedding systems such as Sense2Vec incorporate linguistic features such as part-of-speech, why are these embeddings not more commonly used?
Across popular work in NLP today, Word2Vec and GloVe are the most commonly used word embedding systems. Despite the fact that they only incorporate word information and does not have linguistic features of the words.
For example, in sentiment analysis, text classification or machine translation tasks, it makes logical sense that if the input incorporates linguistic features as well, performance could be improved. Particular when disambiguating words such as "duck" the verb and "duck" the noun.
Is this thinking flawed? Or is there some other practical reason why these embeddings are not more widely used.
It's a very subjective question. One reason is the pos-tagger itself. Pos-tagger is a probabilistic model which could add to the overall error/confusion.
For eg. say you have dense representations for duck-NP and duck-VB but during run/inference time your pos-tagger tags 'duck' as something else then you wont even find it. Moreover it also effectively reduces the total number of times your system sees the word duck hence one could argue that representations generated would be weak.
To top it off the main problem which sense2vec was addressing is contextualisation of word representations which has been solved by contextual representations like BERT and ElMo etc. without producing any of the above problems.

Fasttext algorithm use only word and subword? or sentences too?

I read the paper and googled as well if there is any good example of the learning method(or more likely learning procedure)
For word2vec, suppose there is corpus sentence
I go to school with lunch box that my mother wrapped every morning
Then with window size 2, it will try to obtain the vector for 'school' by using surrounding words
['go', 'to', 'with', 'lunch']
Now, FastText says that it uses the subword to obtain the vector, so it is definitely use n gram subword, for example with n=3,
['sc', 'sch', 'cho', 'hoo', 'ool', 'school']
Up to here, I understood.
But it is not clear that if the other words are being used for learning for 'school'. I can only guess that other surrounding words are used as well like the word2vec, since the paper mentions
=> the terms Wc and Wt are both used in functions
where Wc is context word and Wt is word at sequence t.
However, it is not clear that how FastText learns the vectors for word.
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Please clearly explain how FastText learning process goes in procedure?
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More precisely I want to know that if FastText also follows the same procedure as Word2Vec while it learns the n-gram characterized subword in addition. Or only n-gram characterized subword with word being used?
How does it vectorize the subword at initial? etc
Any context word has its candidate input vector assembled from the combination of both its full-word token and all its character-n-grams. So if the context word is 'school', and you're using 3-4 character n-grams, the in-training input vector is a combination of the full-word vector for school, and all the n-gram vectors for ['sch', 'cho', 'hoo', 'ool', 'scho', 'choo', 'hool'].)
When that candidate vector is adjusted by training, all the constituent vectors are adjusted. (This is a little like how in word2vec CBOW, mode, all the words of the single average context input vector get adjusted together, when their ability to predict a single target output word is evaluated and improved.)
As a result, those n-grams that happen to be meaningful hints across many similar words – for example, common word-roots or prefixes/suffixes – get positioned where they confer that meaning. (Other n-grams may remain mostly low-magnitude noise, because there's little meaningful pattern to where they appear.)
After training, reported vectors for individual in-vocabulary words are also constructed by combining the full-word vector and all n-grams.
Then, when you also encounter an out-of-vocabulary word, to the extent it shares some or many n-grams with morphologically-similar in-training words, it will get a similar calculated vector – and thus be better than nothing, in guessing what that word's vector should be. (And in the case of small typos or slight variants of known words, the synthesized vector may be pretty good.)
The fastText site states that at least 2 of implemented algorithms do use surrounding words in sentences.
Moreover, the original fastText implementation is open source so you can check how exactly it works exploring the code.

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