Negation handling in NLP - python

I'm currently working on a project, where I want to extract emotion from text. As I'm using conceptnet5 (a semantic network), I can't however simply prefix words in a sentence that contains a negation-word, as those words would simply not show up in conceptnet5's API.
Here's an example:
The movie wasn't that good.
Hence, I figured that I could use wordnet's lemma functionality to replace adjectives in sentences that contain negation-words like (not, ...).
In the previous example, the algorithm would detect wasn't and would replace it with was not.
Further, it would detect a negation-word not, and replace good with it's antonym bad.
The sentence would read:
The movie was that bad.
While I see that this isn't the most elegant way, and it does probably in many cases produce the wrong result, I'd still like to handle negation that way as I frankly don't know any better approach.
Considering my problem:
Unfortunately, I did not find any library that would allow me to replace all occurrences of appended negation-words (wasn't => was not).
I mean I could do it manually, by replacing the occurrences with a regex, but then I would be stuck with the english language.
Therefore I'd like to ask if some of you know a library, function or better method that could help me here.
Currently I'm using python nltk, still it doesn't seem that it contains such functionality, but I may be wrong.
Thanks in advance :)

Cases like wasn't can be simply parsed by tokenization (tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(sentence)): wasn't will turn into was and n't.
But negative meaning can also be formed by 'Quasi negative words, like hardly, barely, seldom' and 'Implied negatives, such as fail, prevent, reluctant, deny, absent', look into this paper. Even more detailed analysis can be found in Christopher Potts' On the negativity of negation
.
Considering your initial problem, sentiment analysis, most modern approaches, as far as I know, don't process negations explicitly; instead, they use supervised approaches with high-order n-grams. Those actually processing negation usually append special prefix NOT_ to all words between negation and punctuation marks.

Related

Keeping Numbers in Doc2Vec Tokenization

I’m in the process of trying to get document similarity values for a corpus of approximately 5,000 legal briefs with Doc2Vec (I recognize that the corpus may be a little bit small, but this is a proof-of-concept project for a larger corpus of approximately 15,000 briefs I’ll have to compile later).
Basically, every other component in the creation of the model is going relatively well so far – each brief I have is in a text file within a larger folder, so I compiled them in my script using glob.glob – but I’m running into a tokenization problem. The difficulty is, as these documents are legal briefs, they contain numbers that I’d like to keep, and many of the guides I’ve been using to help me write the code use Gensim’s simple preprocessing, which I believe eliminates digits from the corpus, in tandem with the TaggedDocument feature. However, I want to do as little preprocessing on the texts as possible.
Below is the code I’ve used, and I’ve tried swapping simple_preprocess for genism.utils.tokenize, but when I do that, I get generator objects that don’t appear workable in my final Doc2Vec model, and I can’t actually see how the corpus looks. When I’ve tried to use other tokenizers, like nltk, I don’t know how to fit that into the TaggedDocument component.
brief_corpus = []
for brief_filename in brief_filenames:
with codecs.open(brief_filename, "r", "utf-8") as brief_file:
brief_corpus.append(
gensim.models.doc2vec.TaggedDocument(
gensim.utils.simple_preprocess(
brief_file.read()),
["{}".format(brief_filename)])) #tagging each brief with its filename
I’d appreciate any advice that anyone can give that would help me combine a tokenizer that just separated on whitespace and didn’t eliminate any numbers with the TaggedDocument feature. Thank you!
Update: I was able to create a rudimentary code for some basic tokenization (I do plan on refining it further) without having to resort to Gensim's simple_preprocessing function. However, I'm having difficulty (again!) when using the TaggedDocument feature - but this time, the tags (which I want to be the file names of each brief) don't match the tokenized document. Basically, each document has a tag, but it's not the right one.
Can anyone possibly advise where I might have gone wrong with the new code below? Thanks!
briefs = []
BriefList = [p for p in os.listdir(FILEPATH) if p.endswith('.txt')]
for brief in BriefList:
str = open(FILEPATH + brief,'r').read()
tokens = re.findall(r"[\w']+|[.,!?;]", str)
tagged_data = [TaggedDocument(tokens, [brief]) for brief in BriefList]
briefs.append(tagged_data)
You're likely going to want to write your own preprocessing/tokenization functions. But don't worry, it's not hard to outdo Gensim's simple_preprocess, even with very crude code.
The only thing Doc2Vec needs as the words of a TaggedDocument is a list of string tokens (typically words).
So first, you might be surprised how well it works to just do a default Python string .split() on your raw strings - which just breaks text on whitespace.
Sure, a bunch of the resulting tokens will then be mixes of words & adjoining punctuation, which may be nearly nonsense.
For example, the word 'lawsuit' at the end of the sentence might appear as 'lawsuit.', which then won't be recognized as the same token as 'lawsuit', and might not appear enough min_count times to even be considered, or otherwise barely rise above serving as noise.
But especially for both longer documents, and larger datasets, no one token, or even 1% of all tokens, has that much influence. This isn't exact-keyword-search, where failing to return a document with 'lawsuit.' for a query on 'lawsuit' would be a fatal failure. A bunch of words 'lost' to such cruft may have hadly any effect on the overall document, or model, performance.
As your datasets seem manageable enough to run lots of experiments, I'd suggest trying this dumbest-possible tokenization – only .split() – just as a baseline to become confident that the algorithm still mostly works as well as some more intrusive operation (like simple_preprocess()).
Then, as you notice, or suspect, or ideally measure with some repeatable evaluation, that some things you'd want to be meaningful tokens aren't treated right, gradually add extra steps of stripping/splitting/canonicalizing characters or tokens. But as much as possible: checking that the extra complexity of code, and runtime, is actually delivering benefits.
For example, further refinements could be some mix of:
For each token created by the simple split(), strip off any non-alphanumeric leading/trailing chars. (Advantages: eliminates that punctuation-fouling-words cruft. Disadvantages: might lose useful symbols, like the leading $ of monetary amounts.)
Before splitting, replace certain single-character punctuation-marks (like say ['.', '"', ',', '(', ')', '!', '?', ';', ':']) with the same character with spaces on both sides - so that they're never connected with nearby words, and instead survive a simple .split() as standalone tokens. (Advantages: also prevents words-plus-punctuation cruft. Disadvantages: breaks up numbers like 2,345.77 or some useful abbreviations.)
At some appropriate stage in tokenization, canonicalize many varied tokens into a smaller set of tokens that may be more meaningful than each of them as rare standalone tokens. For example, $0.01 through $0.99 might all be turned into $0_XX - which then has a better chance of influencting the model, & being associated with 'tiny amount' concepts, than the original standalone tokens. Or replacing all digits with #, so that numbers of similar magnitudes share influence, without diluting the model with a token for every single number.
The exact mix of heuristics, and order of operations, will depend on your goals. But with a corpus only in the thousands of docs (rather than hundreds-of-thousands or millions), even if you do these replacements in a fairly inefficient way (lots of individual string- or regex- replacements in serial), it'll likely be a manageable preprocessing cost.
But you can start simple & only add complexity that your domain-specific knowledge, and evaluations, justifies.

Python3 - Doc2Vec: Get document by vector/ID

I've already built my Doc2Vec model, using around 20.000 files. I'm looking for a way to find the string representation of a given vector/ID, which might be similar to Word2Vec's index2entity. I'm able to get the vector itself, using model['n'], but now I'm wondering whether there's a way to get some sort of string representation of it as well.
If you want to look up your actual training text, for a given text+tag that was part of training, you should retain that mapping outside the Doc2Vec model. (The model doesn't store training texts – only looking at them, repeatedly, during training.)
If you want to generate a text from a Doc2Vec doc-vector, that's not an existing feature, nor do I know any published work describing a reliable technique for doing so.
There's a speculative/experimental bit of work-in-progress for gensim Doc2Vec that will forward-propagate a doc-vector through the model's neural-network, and report back the most-highly-predicted target words. (This is somewhat the opposite of the way infer_vector() works.)
That might, plausibly, give a sort-of summary text. For more details see this open issue & the attached PR-in-progress:
https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/gensim/issues/2459
Whether this is truly useful or likely to become part of gensim is still unclear.
However, note that such a set-of-words wouldn't be grammatical. (It'll just be the ranked-list of most-predicted words. Perhaps some other subsystem could try to string those words together in a natural, grammatical way.)
Also, the subtleties of whether a concept has many potential associates words, or just one, could greatly affect the "top N" results of such a process. Contriving a possible example: there are many words for describing a 'cold' environment. As a result, a doc-vector for a text about something cold might have lots of near-synonyms for 'cold' in the 11th-20th ranked positions – such that the "total likelihood" of at least one cold-ish word is very high, maybe higher than any one other word. But just looking at the top-10 most-predicted words might instead list other "purer" words whose likelihood isn't so divided, and miss the (more-important-overall) sense of "coldness". So, this experimental pseudo-summarization method might benefit from a second-pass that somehow "coalesces" groups-of-related-words into their most-representative words, until some overall proportion (rather than fixed top-N) of the doc-vector's predicted-words are communicated. (This process might be vaguely like finding a set of M words whose "Word Mover's Distance" to the full set of predicted-words is minimized – though that could be a very expensive search.)

Find most SIMILAR sentence/string to a reference one in text corpus in python

my goal is very simple: I have a set of strings or a sentence and I want to find the most similar one within a text corpus.
For example I have the following text corpus: "The front of the library is adorned with the Word of Life mural designed by artist Millard Sheets."
And I'd like to find the substring of the original corpus which is most similar to: "the library facade is painted"
So what I should get as output is: "fhe front of the library is adorned"
The only thing I came up with is to split the original sentence in substrings of variable lengths (eg. in substrings of 3,4,5 strings) and then use something like string.similarity(substring) from the spacy python module to assess the similarities of my target text with all the substrings and then keep the one with the highest value.
It seems a pretty inefficient method. Is there anything better I can do?
It probably works to some degree, but I wouldn't expect the spacy similarity method (averaging word vectors) to work particularly well.
The task you're working on is related to paraphrase detection/identification and semantic textual similarity and there is a lot of existing work. It is frequently used for things like plagiarism detection and the evaluation of machine translation systems, so you might find more approaches by looking in those areas, too.
If you want something that works fairly quickly out of the box for English, one suggestion is terp, which was developed for MT evaluation but shown to work well for paraphrase detection:
https://github.com/snover/terp
Most methods are set up to compare two sentences, so this doesn't address your potential partial sentence matches. Maybe it would make sense to find the most similar sentence and then look for substrings within that sentence that match better than the sentence as a whole?

How to generate homophones on substring level?

I want to generate homophones of words programmatically. Meaning, words that sound similar to the original words.
I've come across the Soundex algorithm, but it just replaces some characters with other characters (like t instead of d). Are there any lists or algorithms that are a little bit more sophisticated, providing at least homophone substrings?
Important: I want to apply this on words that aren't in dictionaries, meaning that I can't rely on whole, real words.
EDIT:
The input is a string which is often a proper name and therefore in no standard (homophone) dictionary. An example could be Google or McDonald's (just to name two popular named entities, but many are much more unpopular).
The output is then a (random) homophone of this string. Since words often have more than one homophone, a single (random) one is my goal. In the case of Google, a homophone could be gugel, or MacDonald's for McDonald's.
How to do this well is a research topic. See for example http://www.inf.ufpr.br/didonet/articles/2014_FPSS.pdf.
But suppose that you want to roll your own.
The first step is figuring out how to turn the letters that you are given into a representation of what it sounds like. This is a very hard problem with guessing required. (eg What sound does "read" make? Depends on whether you are going to read, or you already read!) However text to phonemes converter suggests that Arabet has solved this for English.
Next you'll want this to have been done for every word in a dictionary. Assuming that you can do that for one word, that's just a script.
Then you'll want it stored in a data structure where you can easily find similar sounds. That is in principle no difference than the sort of algorithms that are used for autocorrect for spelling. Only with phonemes instead of letters. You can get a sense of how to do that with http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html. Or try to implement something like what is described in http://fastss.csg.uzh.ch/ifi-2007.02.pdf.
And that is it.

Remove all replicas of a string more than x characters long (regex?)

I'm not certain that regex is the best approach for this, but it seems to be fairly well suited. Essentially I'm currently parsing some pdfs using pdfminer, and the drawback is that these pdf's are exported powerpoint slides, which means that all animations show up as fairly long copies of strings. Ideally I would like just one copy of each of these strings instead of a copy for each stage of an animation. Right now the current regex pattern I'm using is this:
re.sub(r"([\w^\w]{10,})\1{1,}", "\1", string)
For some reason though, this doesn't seem to change the input string. I feel like for some reason python isn't recognizing the capture group, but I'm not sure how to remedy that issue. Any thoughts appreciated.
Examples:
I would like this
text to be
reduced
I would like this
text to be
reduced
output:
I would like this
text to be
reduced
Update:
To get this to pass the pumping lemma I had to specifically make the assertion that all duplicates were adjacent. This was implied before, but I am now making it explicit to ensure that a solution is possible.
regexps are not the right tool for that task. They are based on the theory of context free languages, and they can't match if a string contains duplicates and remove the duplicates. You may find a course on automata and regexps interesting to read on the topic.
I think Josay's suggestion can be efficient and smart, but I think I got a more simple and pythonic solution, though it has its limits. You can split your string into a list of lines, and pass it through a set():
>>> s = """I would like this
... text to be
...
... reduced
... I would like this
... text to be
...
... reduced"""
>>> print "\n".join(set(s.splitlines()))
I would like this
text to be
reduced
>>>
The only thing with that solution is that you will loose the original order of the lines (the example being a pretty counter example). Also, if you have the same line in two different contexts, you will end up having only one line.
To fix the first problem, you may have to then iterate over your original string a second time to put that set back in order, or simply use an ordered set.
If you got any symbol separating each slide, it would help you merge only the duplicates, fixing the second problem of that solution.
Otherwise a more sophisticated algorithm would be needed, so you can take into account proximity and context. For that a suffix tree could be a good idea, and there are python libraries for that (cf that SO answer).
edit:
using your algorithm I could make it work, by adding support of multiline and adding spaces and endlines to your text matching:
>>> re.match(r"([\w \n]+)\n\1", string, re.MULTILINE).groups()
('I would like this\ntext to be\n\nreduced',)
Though, afaict the \1 notation is not a regular regular expression syntax in the matching part, but an extension. But it's getting late here, and I may as well be totally wrong. Maybe shall I reread those courses? :-)
I guess that the regexp engine's pushdown automata is able to push matches, because it is only a long multiline string that it can pop to match. Though I'd expect it to have side effects...

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