Given "violence" as input would it be possible to come up with how violence construed by a person (e.g. physical violence, a book, an album, a musical group ..) as mentioned below in Ref #1.
Assuming if the user meant an Album, what would be the best way to look for violence as an album from a set of tweets.
Is there a way to infer this via any of the NLP API(s) say OpenNLP.
Ref #1
violence/N1 - intentional harmful physical action.
violence/N2 - the property of being wild or turbulent.
Violence/N6 - a book from Neil L. Whitehead; nonfiction
Violence/N7 - an album by The Last Resort
Violence/N8 - Violence is the third album by the Washington-based Alternative metal music group Nothingface.
Violence/N9 - a musical group which produced the albums Eternal Nightmare and Nothing to Gain
Violence/N10 - a song by Aesthetic Perfection, Angel Witch, Arsenic, Beth Torbert, Brigada Flores Magon, etc on the albums A Natural Disaster, Adult Themes for Voice, I Bificus, Retribution, S.D.E., etc
Violence/N11 - an album by Bombardier, Dark Quarterer and Invisible Limits
Violence/N12 - a song by CharlElie Couture, EsprieM, Fraebbblarnir, Ian Hunter, Implant, etc on the albums All the Young Dudes, Broke, No Regrets, Power of Limits, Repercussions, etc
Violence/N18 - Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed is a short, 32-page roleplaying game written by Greg Costikyan under the pseudonym "Designer X" and published by Hogshead Publishing as part of its New Style line of games.
Violence/N42 - Violence (1947) is an American drama film noir directed by Jack Bernhard.
Pure automatic inference is a little to hard in general for this problem.
Instead we might use :
Resources like WordNet, or a semantics dictionary.
For languages other than English you can look at eurowordnet (non free) dataset.
To get more meaning (i.e. for the album sense) we process some well managed resource like Wikipedia. Wikipedia as a lot of meta information that would be very useful for this kind of processing.
The reliability of the process is achieve just by combining the maximum number of data source and processing them correctly, with specialized programs.
As a last resort you may try hand processing/annotating. Long and costly, but useful in enterprise context where you need only a small part of a language.
No free lunch here.
If you're working on English NLP in python, then you can try the wordnet API as such:
from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
query = 'violence'
for ss in wn.synsets(query):
print query, str(ss.offset).zfill(8)+'-'+ss.pos, ss.definition
If you're working on other human languages, maybe you can take a look at the open wordnets available from http://casta-net.jp/~kuribayashi/multi/
NOTE: the reason for str(ss.offset).zfill(8)+'-'+ss.pos, it's because it is used as the unique id for each sense of a specific word. And this id is consistent across the open wordnets for every language. the first 8 digits gives the id and the character after the dash is the Part-of-Speech of the sense.
Check this out: Twitter Filtering Demo from Idilia. It does exactly what you want by first analyzing a piece of text to discover the meaning of its words and then filtering the texts that contain the sense that you are looking for. It's available as an API.
Disclaimer: I work for Idilia.
You can extract all contexts "violence" occurs in (context can be a whole document, or a window of say 50 words), then convert them into features (using say bag of words), then cluster these features. As clustering is unsupervised, you won't have names for the clusters, but you can label them with some typical context.
Then you need to see which cluster "violence" in the query belongs to. Either based on other words in the query which act as a context or by asking explicitly (Do you mean violence as in "...." or as in "....")
This will be incredibly difficult due to the fact that the proper noun uses of the word 'Violence' will be incredibly infrequent as a proportion of all words and their frequency distribution is likely highly skewed in some way. We run into these problems almost any time we want to do some form of Named Entity Disambiguation.
No tool I'm aware of will do this for you, so you will be building your own classifier. Using Wikipedia as a training resource as Mr K suggested is probably your best bet.
Related
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.
I'm new to natural language process so I apologize if my question is unclear. I have read a book or two on the subject and done general research of various libraries to figure out how i should be doing this, but I'm not confident yet that know what to do.
I'm playing with an idea for an application and part of it is trying to find product mentions in unstructured text (e.g. tweets, facebook posts, emails, websites, etc.) in real-time. I wont go into what the products are but it can be assumed that they are known (stored in a file or database). Some examples:
"starting tomorrow, we have 5 boxes of #hersheys snickers available for $5 each - limit 1 pp" (snickers is the product from the hershey company [mentioned as "#hersheys"])
"Big news: 12-oz. bottles of Coke and Pepsi on sale starting Fri." (coca-cola is the product [aliased as "coke"] from coca-cola company and Pepsi is the product from the PepsiCo company)
"#OMG, i just bought my dream car. a mustang!!!!" (mustang is the product from Ford)
So basically, given a piece of text, query the text to see if it mentions a product and receive some indication (boolean or confidence number) that it does mention the product.
Some concerns I have are:
Missing products because of misspellings. I thought maybe i could use a string similarity check to catch these.
Product names that are also English words or things would get caught. Like mustang the horse versus mustang the car
Needing to keep a list of alternative names for products (e.g. "coke" for "coco-cola", etc.)
I don't really know where to start with this but any help would be appreciated. I've already looked at NLTK and SciKit and didn't really gleam how to do this from there. If you know of examples or papers that explain this, links would be helpful. I'm not specific to any language at this point. Java preferably but Python and Scala are acceptable.
The answer that you chose is not really answering your question.
The best approach you can take is using Named Entity Recognizer(NER) and POS tagger (grab NNP/NNPS; Proper nouns). The database there might be missing some new brands like Lyft (Uber's rival) but without developing your own prop database, Stanford tagger will solve half of your immediate needs.
If you have time, I would build the dictionary that has every brands name and simply extract it from tweet strings.
http://www.namedevelopment.com/brand-names.html
If you know how to crawl, it's not a hard problem to solve.
It looks like your goal is to classify linguistic forms in a given text as references to semantic entities (which can be referred to by many different linguistic forms). You describe a number of subtasks which should be done in order to get good results, but they nevertheless are still independent tasks.
Misspellings
In order to deal with potential misspellings of words, you need to associate these possible misspellings to their canonical (i.e. correct) form.
Phonetic similarity: Many reasons for "misspellings" is opacity in the relationship between the word's phonetic form (i.e. how it sounds) and its orthographic form (i.e. how it's spelled). Therefore, a good way to address this is to index terms phonetically so that e.g. innovashun is associated with innovation.
Form similarity: Additionally, you could do a string similarity check, but you may introduce a lot of noise into your results which you would have to address because many distinct words are in fact very similar (e.g. chic vs. chick). You could make this a bit smarter by first morphologically analyzing the word and then using a tree kernel instead.
Hand-made mappings: You can also simply make a list of common misspelling → canonical_form mappings. This would work well for "exceptions" not handled by the above methods.
Word-sense disambiguation
Mustang the car and Mustang the horse are the same form but refer to entirely different entities (or rather classes of entities, if you want to be pedantic). In fact, we ourselves as humans can't tell which one is meant unless we also know the word's context. One widely-used way of modelling this context is distributional lexical semantics: Defining a word's semantic similarity to another as the similarity of their lexical contexts, i.e. the words preceding and succeeding them in text.
Linguistic aliases (synonyms)
As stated above, any given semantic entity can be referred to in a number of different ways: bathroom, washroom, restroom, toilet, water closet, WC, loo, little boys'/girls' room, throne room etc. For simple meanings referring to generic entities like this, they can often be considered to be variant spellings in the same way that "common misspellings" are and can be mapped to a "canonical" form with a list. For ambiguous references such as throne room, other metrics (such as lexical-distributional methods) can also be included in order to disambiguate the meaning, so that you don't relate e.g. I'm in the throne room just now! to The throne room of the Buckingham Palace is beautiful.
Conclusion
You have a lot of work to do in order to get where you want to go, but it's all interesting stuff and there are already good libraries available for doing most of these tasks.
I have some texts in different languages and, potentially, with some typo or other mistake, and I want to retrieve their own vocabulary. I'm not experienced with NLP in general, so maybe I use some word improperly.
With vocabulary I mean a collection of words of a single language in which every word is unique and the inflections for gender, number, or tense are not considered (e.g. think, thinks and thought are are all consider think).
This is the master problem, so let's reduce it to the vocabulary retrieving of one language, English for example, and without mistakes.
I think there are (at least) three different approaches and maybe the solution consists of a combination of them:
search in a database of words stored in relation with each others. So, I could search for thought (considering the verb) and read the associated information that thought is an inflection of think
compute the "base form" (a word without inflections) of a word by processing the inflected form. Maybe it can be done with stemming?
use a service by any API. Yes, I accept also this approach, but I'd prefer to do it locally
For a first approximation, it's not necessary that the algorithm distinguishes between nouns and verbs. For instance, if in the text there were the word thought like both noun and verb, it could be considered already present in the vocabulary at the second match.
We have reduced the problem to retrieve a vocabulary of an English text without mistakes, and without consider the tag of the words.
Any ideas about how to do that? Or just some tips?
Of course, if you have suggestions about this problem also with the others constraints (mistakes and multi-language, not only Indo-European languages), they would be much appreciated.
You need lemmatization - it's similar to your 2nd item, but not exactly (difference).
Try nltk lemmatizer for Python or Standford NLP/Clear NLP for Java. Actually nltk uses WordNet, so it is really combination of 1st and 2nd approaches.
In order to cope with mistakes use spelling correction before lemmatization. Take a look at related questions or Google for appropriate libs.
About part of speech tag - unfortunately, nltk doesn't consider POS tag (and context in general), so you should provide it with the tag that can be found by nltk pos tagging. Again, it is already discussed here (and related/linked questions). I'm not sure about Stanford NLP here - I guess it should consider context, but I was sure that NLTK does so. As I can see from this code snippet, Stanford doesn't use POS tags, while Clear NLP does.
About other languages - google for lemmatization models, since algorithm for most languages (at least from the same family) is almost the same, differences are in training data. Take a look here for example of German; it is a wrapper for several lemmatizers, as I can see.
However, you always can use stemmer at cost of precision, and stemmer is more easily available for different languages.
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So I have an idea for classifying sentiments of sentences talking about a given brand product (in this case, pepsi). Basically, let's say I wanted to figure out how people feel about the taste of pepsi. Given this problem, I want to construct abstract sentence templates, basically possible sentence structures that would indicate an opinion about the taste of pepsi. Here's one example for a three word sentence:
[Pepsi] [tastes] [good, bad, great, horrible, etc.]
I then look through my database of sentences, and try to find ones that match this particular structure. Once I have this, I can simply extract the third component and get a sentiment regarding this particular aspect (taste) of this particular entity (pepsi).
The application for this would be looking at tweets, so this might yield a few tweets from the past year or so, but it wouldn't be enough to get an accurate read on the general sentiment, so I would create other possible structures, like:
[I] [love, hate, dislike, like, etc.] [the taste of pepsi]
[I] [love, hate, dislike, like, etc.] [the way pepsi tastes]
[I] [love, hate, dislike, like, etc.] [how pepsi tastes]
And so on and so forth.
Of course most tweets won't be this simple, there would be possible words that would mean the same as pepsi, or words in between the major components, etc - deviations that it would not be practical to account for.
What I'm looking for is just a general direction, or a subfield of sentiment analysis that discusses this particular problem. I have no problem coming up with a large list of possible structures, it's just the deviations from the structures that I'm worried about. I know this is something like a syntax tree, but most of what I've read about them has just been about generating text - in this case I'm trying to match a sentence to a structure, and pull out the entity, sentiment, and aspect components to get a basic three word answer.
This templates approach is the core idea behind my own sentiment mining work. You might find study of EBMT (example-based machine translation) interesting, as a similar (but under-studied) approach in the realm of machine translation.
Get familiar with Wordnet, for automatically generating rephrasings (there are hundreds of papers that build on WordNet, some of which will be useful to you). (The WordNet book is getting old now, but worth at least a skim read if you can find it in a library.)
I found Bing Liu's book a very useful overview of all the different aspects and approachs to sentiment mining, and a good introduction to further reading. (The Amazon UK reviews are so negative I wondered if it was a different book! The Amazon US reviews are more positive, though.)
I am looking for an algorithm or method that would help identify general phrases from a corpus of text that has a particular dialect (it is from a specific domain but for my case is a dialect of the English language) -- for example the following fragment could be from a larger corpus related to the World or Warcraft or perhaps MMORPHs.
players control a character avatar within a game world in third person or first person view, exploring the landscape, fighting various monsters, completing quests, and interacting with non-player characters (NPCs) or other players. Also similar to other MMORPGs, World of Warcraft requires the player to pay for a subscription, either by buying prepaid game cards for a selected amount of playing time, or by using a credit or debit card to pay on a regular basis
As output from the above I would like to identify the following general phrases:
first person
World of Warcraft
prepaid game cards
debit card
Notes:
There is a previous questions similar to mine here and here but for clarification mine has the following differences:
a. I am trying to use an existing toolkit such as NLTK, OpenNLP, etc.
b. I am not interested in identifying other Parts of Speech in the sentence
c. I can use human intervention where the algorithm presents the identified noun phrases to a human expert and the human expert can then confirm or reject the findings however we do not have resources for training a model of language on hand-annotated data
Nltk has built in part of speech tagging that has proven pretty good at identifying unknown words. That said, you seem to misunderstand what a noun is and you should probably solidify your understanding of both parts of speech, and your question.
For instance, in first person first is an adjective. You could automatically assume that associated adjectives are a part of that phrase.
Alternately, if you're looking to identify general phrases my suggestion would be to implement a simple Markov Chain model and then look for especially high transition probabilities.
If you're looking for a Markov Chain implementation in Python I would point you towards this gist that I wrote up back in the day: https://gist.github.com/Slater-Victoroff/6227656
If you want to get much more advanced than that, you're going to quickly descend into dissertation territory. I hope that helps.
P.S. Nltk includes a huge number of pre-annotated corpuses that might work for your purposes.
It appears you are trying to do noun phrase extraction. The TextBlob Python library includes two noun phrase extraction implementations out of the box.
The simplest way to get started is to use the default FastNPExtractor which is based of Shlomi Babluki's algorithm described here.
from text.blob import TextBlob
text = '''
players control a character avatar within a game world in third person or first
person view, exploring the landscape, fighting various monsters, completing quests,
and interacting with non-player characters (NPCs) or other players. Also similar
to other MMORPGs, World of Warcraft requires the player to pay for a
subscription, either by buying prepaid game cards for a selected amount of
playing time, or by using a credit or debit card to pay on a regular basis
'''
blob = TextBlob(text)
print(blob.noun_phrases) # ['players control', 'character avatar' ...]
Swapping out for the other implementation (an NLTK-based chunker) is quite easy.
from text.np_extractors import ConllExtractor
blob = TextBlob(text, np_extractor=ConllExtractor())
print(blob.noun_phrases) # ['character avatar', 'game world' ...]
If neither of these suffice, you can create your own noun phrase extractor class. I recommend looking at the TextBlob np_extractor module source for examples. To gain a better understanding of noun phrase chunking, check out the NLTK book, Chapter 7.