I've used gensim Word2Vec to learn the embedding of monetary amounts and other numeric data in bank transaction memos. The goal is to use this to be able to extract these amounts and currencies from future input strings.
Design
Our input strings are something like
"AMAZON.COM TXNw98e7r3347 USD 49.00 # 1.283"
During preprocessing, I tokenize and also replace all tokens that have the possibility of being a monetary amount (string consisting only of digits, commas, and <= 1 decimal point/period) with a special VALUE_TOKEN. And I also manually replace exchange rates with RATE_TOKEN. The result would be
["AMAZON", ".COM", "TXNw", "98", "e", "7", "r", "3347", "USD", "VALUE_TOKEN", "#", "RATE_TOKEN"]
With all my preprocessed lists of strings in list data, I generate model
model = Word2Vec(data, window=3, min_count=3)
The embeddings of model that I'm most interested in are that of VALUE_TOKEN, RATE_TOKEN, as well as any currencies (USD, EUR, CAD, etc.). Now that I generated the model, I'm not sure what to do with it.
Problem
Say I have a new string that the model has never seen before,
new_string = "EUR 299.99 RATE 1.3289 WITH FEE 5.00"
I would like to use model to identify which tokens of new_string is most contextually similar to VALUE_TOKEN (which should return ["299.99", "5.00"]), which is closest to RATE_TOKEN ("1.3289"). It should be able to classify these based on the learned embedding. I can preprocess new_string the way I do with the training data, but because I don't know the exchange rate before hand, all three tokens of ["299.99", "5.00", "1.3289"] will be tagged the same (either with VALUE_TOKEN or a new UNIDENTIFIED_TOKEN).
I've looked into methods like most_similar and similarity but don't think they work for tokens that are not necessarily in the vocabulary. What methods should I use to do this? Is this the right approach?
Word2vec's fuzzy, dense embedded token representations don't strike me as the right tool for what you're doing, though they might perhaps be an indirect contributor to a hybrid approach.
In particular:
The word2vec algorithm originated from, & has the most consistent public results, when applied to natural-language texts, with their particular patterns of relative token frequences, and varied co-occurrences. Certainly, many ahave applied it, with success, to other kinds of text/record data, but such uses may require a lot more preprocessing/parameter-tuning, and to the extent the underlying data has some fixed, highly-repetitive scheme, might be more amenable to other approaches.
If you replace all known values with 'VALUE_TOKEN', & all known rates with 'RATE_TOKEN', then the model is only going to learn token-vectors for 'VALUE_TOKEN' & 'RATE_TOKEN'. Such a model won't be able to supply any vector for non-replaced tokens it's never seen like '$1.2345' or '299.99'. Even collapsing all those to 'UNIDENTIFIED_TOKEN' just limits the model to whatever it learned earlier was the vector for 'UNIDENTIFIED_TOKEN' (if any, in the training data).
I've not noticed existing word2vec implementations offering an interface for inferring the word-vector for new unknown-vectors, from just one or several new examples of its appearance in-context. They could, in the same style of new-document-vector inference used by 'Paragraph Vectors'/Doc2Vec, but just don't.) The closest I've seen is Gensim's predict_output_word(), which does a CBOW-like forward-propagation on negative-sampling models, to every 'output node' (one per known word), to give a ranked list of the known-words most-likely to appear given some context words.
That predict_output_word() might, if fed surrounding known-tokens, contribute to your needs by whether it says your 'VALUE_TOKEN' or 'RATE_TOKEN' is a more-likely model-prediction. You could adapt its code to only evaluate those two candidates, if you're always sure the right answer is one or the other, for a speed-up. A simple comparison of the average-of-context-word-vectors, and the candidate-answer vectors, might be as effective as the full forward-propagation.
Alternatively, you might want use the word2vec model solely as a source of features (via context-words) for some other classifier, which is trained to answer VALUE or TOKEN. This other classifier's input might include things like:
some average of the vectors of all nearby tokens
the full vectors of closest neighbors
a one-hot encoding ('bag-of-words') of all nearby (or 'preceding') or 'following) known-tokens, assuming the vocabulary of non-numerical tokens is fairly short & highly indicative
?
If the data streams might include arbitrary new or corrupted tokens whose meaning might be inferrable from substrings, you could consider a FastText model as well.
Related
Here I have a word2vec model, suppose I use the google-news-300 model
import gensim.downloader as api
word2vec_model300 = api.load('word2vec-google-news-300')
I want to find the similar words for "AI" or "artifical intelligence", so I want to write
word2vec_model300.most_similar("artifical intelligence")
and I got errors
KeyError: "word 'artifical intelligence' not in vocabulary"
So what is the right way to extract similar words for bigram words?
Thanks in advance!
At one level, when a word-token isn't in a fixed set of word-vectors, the creators of that set of word-vectors chose not to train/model that word. So, anything you do will only be a crude workaround for its absence.
Note, though, that when Google prepared those vectors – based on a dataset of news articles from before 2012 – they also ran some statistical multigram-combinations on it, creating multigrams with connecting _ characters. So, first check if a vector for 'artificial_intelligence' might be present.
If it isn't, you could try other rough workarounds like averaging together the vectors for 'artificial' and 'intelligence' – though of course that won't really be what people mean by the distinct combination of those words, just meanings suggested by the independent words.
The Gensim .most_similar() method can take either a raw vectors you've created by operations such as averaging, or even a list of multiple words which it will average for you, as arguments via its explicit keyword positive parameter. For example:
word2vec_model300.most_similar(positive=[average_vector])
...or...
word2vec_model300.most_similar(positive=['artificial', 'intelligence'])
Finally, though Google's old vectors are handy, they're a bit old now, & from a particular domain (popular news articles) where senses may not match tose used in other domains (or more recently). So you may want to seek alternate vectors, or train your own if you have sufficient data from your area of interest, to have apprpriate meanings – including vectors for any particular multigrams you choose to tokenize in your data.
Take the following sentence:
I'm going to change the light bulb
The meaning of change means replace, as in someone is going to replace the light bulb. This could easily be solved by using a dictionary api or something similar. However, the following sentences
I need to go the bank to change some currency
You need to change your screen brightness
The first sentence does not mean replace anymore, it means Exchangeand the second sentence, change means adjust.
If you were trying to understand the meaning of change in this situation, what techniques would someone use to extract the correct definition based off of the context of the sentence? What is what I'm trying to do called?
Keep in mind, the input would only be one sentence. So something like:
Screen brightness is typically too bright on most peoples computers.
People need to change the brightness to have healthier eyes.
Is not what I'm trying to solve, because you can use the previous sentence to set the context. Also this would be for lots of different words, not just the word change.
Appreciate the suggestions.
Edit: I'm aware that various embedding models can help gain insight on this problem. If this is your answer, how do you interpret the word embedding that is returned? These arrays can be upwards of 500+ in length which isn't practical to interpret.
What you're trying to do is called Word Sense Disambiguation. It's been a subject of research for many years, and while probably not the most popular problem it remains a topic of active research. Even now, just picking the most common sense of a word is a strong baseline.
Word embeddings may be useful but their use is orthogonal to what you're trying to do here.
Here's a bit of example code from pywsd, a Python library with implementations of some classical techniques:
>>> from pywsd.lesk import simple_lesk
>>> sent = 'I went to the bank to deposit my money'
>>> ambiguous = 'bank'
>>> answer = simple_lesk(sent, ambiguous, pos='n')
>>> print answer
Synset('depository_financial_institution.n.01')
>>> print answer.definition()
'a financial institution that accepts deposits and channels the money into lending activities'
The methods are mostly kind of old and I can't speak for their quality but it's a good starting point at least.
Word senses are usually going to come from WordNet.
I don't know how useful this is but from my POV, word vector embeddings are naturally separated and the position in the sample space is closely related to different uses of the word. However like you said often a word may be used in several contexts.
To Solve this purpose, generally encoding techniques that utilise the context like continuous bag of words, or continous skip gram models are used for classification of the usage of word in a particular context like change for either exchange or adjust. This very idea is applied in LSTM based architectures as well or RNNs where the context is preserved over input sequences.
The interpretation of word-vectors isn't practical from a visualisation point of view, but only from 'relative distance' point of view with other words in the sample space. Another way is to maintain a matrix of the corpus with contextual uses being represented for the words in that matrix.
In fact there's a neural network that utilises bidirectional language model to first predict the upcoming word then at the end of the sentence goes back and tries to predict the previous word. It's called ELMo. You should go through the paper.ELMo Paper and this blog
Naturally the model learns from representative examples. So the better training set you give with the diverse uses of the same word, the better model can learn to utilise context to attach meaning to the word. Often this is what people use to solve their specific cases by using domain centric training data.
I think these could be helpful:
Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in
Vector Space
Pretrained language models like BERT could be useful for this as mentioned in another answer. Those models generate a representation based on the context.
The recent pretrained language models use wordpieces but spaCy has an implementation that aligns those to natural language tokens. There is a possibility then for example to check the similarity of different tokens based on the context. An example from https://explosion.ai/blog/spacy-transformers
import spacy
import torch
import numpy
nlp = spacy.load("en_trf_bertbaseuncased_lg")
apple1 = nlp("Apple shares rose on the news.")
apple2 = nlp("Apple sold fewer iPhones this quarter.")
apple3 = nlp("Apple pie is delicious.")
print(apple1[0].similarity(apple2[0])) # 0.73428553
print(apple1[0].similarity(apple3[0])) # 0.43365782
I have been searching and attempting to implement a word embedding model to predict similarity between words. I have a dataset made up 3,550 company names, the idea is that the user can provide a new word (which would not be in the vocabulary) and calculate the similarity between the new name and existing ones.
During preprocessing I got rid of stop words and punctuation (hyphens, dots, commas, etc). In addition, I applied stemming and separated prefixes with the hope to get more precision. Then words such as BIOCHEMICAL ended up as BIO CHEMIC which is the word divided in two (prefix and stem word)
The average company name length is made up 3 words with the following frequency:
The tokens that are the result of preprocessing are sent to word2vec:
#window: Maximum distance between the current and predicted word within a sentence
#min_count: Ignores all words with total frequency lower than this.
#workers: Use these many worker threads to train the model
#sg: The training algorithm, either CBOW(0) or skip gram(1). Default is 0s
word2vec_model = Word2Vec(prepWords,size=300, window=2, min_count=1, workers=7, sg=1)
After the model included all the words in the vocab , the average sentence vector is calculated for each company name:
df['avg_vector']=df2.apply(lambda row : avg_sentence_vector(row, model=word2vec_model, num_features=300, index2word_set=set(word2vec_model.wv.index2word)).tolist())
Then, the vector is saved for further lookups:
##Saving name and vector values in file
df.to_csv('name-submission-vectors.csv',encoding='utf-8', index=False)
If a new company name is not included in the vocab after preprocessing (removing stop words and punctuation), then I proceed to create the model again and calculate the average sentence vector and save it again.
I have found this model is not working as expected. As an example, calculating the most similar words pet is getting the following results:
ms=word2vec_model.most_similar('pet')
('fastfood', 0.20879755914211273)
('hammer', 0.20450574159622192)
('allur', 0.20118337869644165)
('wright', 0.20001833140850067)
('daili', 0.1990675926208496)
('mgt', 0.1908089816570282)
('mcintosh', 0.18571510910987854)
('autopart', 0.1729743778705597)
('metamorphosi', 0.16965581476688385)
('doak', 0.16890916228294373)
In the dataset, I have words such as paws or petcare, but other words are creating relationships with pet word.
This is the distribution of the nearer words for pet:
On the other hand, when I used the GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin.gz, I could not add new words to the vocab, but the similarity between pet and words around was as expected:
ms=word2vec_model.most_similar('pet')
('pets', 0.771199643611908)
('Pet', 0.723974347114563)
('dog', 0.7164785265922546)
('puppy', 0.6972636580467224)
('cat', 0.6891531348228455)
('cats', 0.6719794869422913)
('pooch', 0.6579219102859497)
('Pets', 0.636363685131073)
('animal', 0.6338439583778381)
('dogs', 0.6224827170372009)
This is the distribution of the nearest words:
I would like to get your advice about the following:
Is this dataset appropriate to proceed with this model?
Is the length of the dataset enough to allow word2vec "learn" the relationships between the words?
What can I do to improve the model to make word2vec create relationships of the same type as GoogleNews where for instance word pet is correctly set among similar words?
Is it feasible to implement another alternative such as fasttext considering the nature of the current dataset?
Do you know any public dataset that can be used along with the current dataset to create those relationships?
Thanks
3500 texts (company names) of just ~3 words each is only around 10k total training words, with a much smaller vocabulary of unique words.
That's very, very small for word2vec & related algorithms, which rely on lots of data, and sufficiently-varied data, to train-up useful vector arrangements.
You may be able to squeeze some meaningful training from limited data by using far more training epochs than the default epochs=5, and far smaller vectors than the default size=100. With those sorts of adjustments, you may start to see more meaningful most_similar() results.
But, it's unclear that word2vec, and specifically word2vec in your averaging-of-a-name's-words comparisons, is matched to your end goals.
Word2vec needs lots of data, doesn't look at subword units, and can't say anything about word-tokens not seen during training. An average-of-many-word-vectors can often work as an easy baseline for comparing multiword texts, but might also dilute some word's influence compared to other methods.
Things to consider might include:
Word2vec-related algorithms like FastText that also learn vectors for subword units, and can thus bootstrap not-so-bad guess vectors for words not seen in training. (But, these are also data hungry, and to use on a small dataset you'd again want to reduce vector size, increase epochs, and additionally shrink the number of buckets used for subword learning.)
More sophisticated comparisons of multi-word texts, like "Word Mover's Distance". (That can be quite expensive on longer texts, but for names/titles of just a few words may be practical.)
Finding more data that's compatible with your aims for a stronger model. A larger database of company names might help. If you just want your analysis to understand English words/roots, more generic training texts might work too.
For many purposes, a mere lexicographic comparison - edit distances, count of shared character-n-grams – may be helpful too, though it won't detect all synonyms/semantically-similar words.
Word2vec does not generalize to unseen words.
It does not even work well for wards that are seen but rare. It really depends on having many many examples of word usage. Furthermore a you need enough context left and right, but you only use company names - these are too short. That is likely why your embeddings perform so poorly: too little data and too short texts.
Hence, it is the wrong approach for you. Retraining the model with the new company name is not enough - you still only have one data point. You may as well leave out unseen words, word2vec cannot work better than that even if you retrain.
If you only want to compute similarity between words, probably you don't need to insert new words in your vocabulary.
By eye, I think you can also use FastText without the need to stem the words. It also computes vectors for unknown words.
From FastText FAQ:
One of the key features of fastText word representation is its ability
to produce vectors for any words, even made-up ones. Indeed, fastText
word vectors are built from vectors of substrings of characters
contained in it. This allows to build vectors even for misspelled
words or concatenation of words.
FastText seems to be useful for your purpose.
For your task, you can follow FastText supervised tutorial.
If your corpus proves to be too small, you can build your model starting from availaible pretrained vectors (pretrainedVectors parameter).
I am reading about n-grams and I am wondering whether there is a case in practice when uni-grams would are preferred to be used over bi-grams (or higher N-grams). As I understand, the bigger N, the bigger complexity to calculate the probabilities and establish the vector space. But apart from that, are there other reasons (e.g. related to type of data)?
This boils down to data sparsity: As your n-gram length increases, the amount of times you will see any given n-gram will decrease: In the most extreme example, if you have a corpus where the maximum document length is n tokens and you are looking for an m-gram where m=n+1, you will, of course, have no data points at all because it's simply not possible to have a sequence of that length in your data set. The more sparse your data set, the worse you can model it. For this reason, despite that a higher-order n-gram model, in theory, contains more information about a word's context, it cannot easily generalize to other data sets (known as overfitting) because the number of events (i.e. n-grams) it has seen during training becomes progressively less as n increases. On the other hand, a lower-order model lacks contextual information and so may underfit your data.
For this reason, if you have a very relatively large amount of token types (i.e. the vocabulary of your text is very rich) but each of these types has a very low frequency, you may get better results with a lower-order n-gram model. Similarly, if your training data set is very small, you may do better with a lower-order n-gram model. However, assuming that you have enough data to avoid over-fitting, you then get better separability of your data with a higher-order model.
Usually, n-grams more than 1 is better as it carries more information about the context in general. However, sometimes unigrams are also calculated besides bigram and trigrams and used as fallback for them. This is usefull also, if you want high recall than precision to search unigrams, for instance, you are searching for all possible uses of verb "make".
Lets use Statistical Machine Translation as an Example:
Intuitively, the best scenario is that your model has seen the full sentence (lets say 6-grams) before and knows its translation as a whole. If this is not the case you try to divide it to smaller n-grams, keeping into consideration that the more information you know about the word surroundings, the better the translation. For example, if you want to translate "Tom Green" to German, if you have seen the bi-gram you will know it is a person name and should remain as it is but if your model never saw it, you would fall back to unigrams and translate "Tom" and "Green" separately. Thus "Green" will be translated as a color to "Grün" and so on.
Also, in search knowing more about the surrounding context makes the results more accurate.
Binarization is the act of transforming colorful features of of an entity into vectors of numbers, most often binary vectors, to make good examples for classifier algorithms.
If we where to binarize the sentence "The cat ate the dog", we could start by assigning every word an ID (for example cat-1, ate-2, the-3, dog-4) and then simply replace the word by it's ID giving the vector <3,1,2,3,4>.
Given these IDs we could also create a binary vector by giving each word four possible slots, and setting the slot corresponding to a specific word with to one, giving the vector <0,0,1,0,1,0,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,1>. The latter method is, as far as I know, is commonly referred to as the bag-of-words-method.
Now for my question, what is the best binarization method when it comes to describe features for natural language processing in general, and transition-based dependency parsing (with Nivres algorithm) in particular?
In this context, we do not want to encode the whole sentence, but rather the current state of the parse, for example the top word on the stack en the first word in the input queue. Since order is highly relevant, this rules out the bag-of-words-method.
With best, I am referring to the method that makes the data the most intelligible for the classifier, without using up unnecessary memory. For example I don't want a word bigram to use 400 million features for 20000 unique words, if only 2% the bigrams actually exist.
Since the answer is also depending on the particular classifier, I am mostly interested in maximum entropy models (liblinear), support vector machines (libsvm) and perceptrons, but answers that apply to other models are also welcome.
This is actually a really complex question. The first decision you have to make is whether to lemmatize your input tokens (your words). If you do this, you dramatically decrease your type count, and your syntax parsing gets a lot less complicated. However, it takes a lot of work to lemmatize a token. Now, in a computer language, this task gets greatly reduced, as most languages separate keywords or variable names with a well defined set of symbols, like whitespace or a period or whatnot.
The second crucial decision is what you're going to do with the data post-facto. The "bag-of-words" method, in the binary form you've presented, ignores word order, which is completely fine if you're doing summarization of a text or maybe a Google-style search where you don't care where the words appear, as long as they appear. If, on the other hand, you're building something like a compiler or parser, order is very much important. You can use the token-vector approach (as in your second paragraph), or you can extend the bag-of-words approach such that each non-zero entry in the bag-of-words vector contains the linear index position of the token in the phrase.
Finally, if you're going to be building parse trees, there are obvious reasons why you'd want to go with the token-vector approach, as it's a big hassle to maintain sub-phrase ids for every word in the bag-of-words vector, but very easy to make "sub-vectors" in a token-vector. In fact, Eric Brill used a token-id sequence for his part-of-speech tagger, which is really neat.
Do you mind if I ask what specific task you're working on?
Binarization is the act of
transforming colorful features of
an entity into vectors of numbers,
most often binary vectors, to make
good examples for classifier
algorithms.
I have mostly come across numeric features that take values between 0 and 1 (not binary as you describe), representing the relevance of the particular feature in the vector (between 0% and 100%, where 1 represents 100%). A common example for this are tf-idf vectors: in the vector representing a document (or sentence), you have a value for each term in the entire vocabulary that indicates the relevance of that term for the represented document.
As Mike already said in his reply, this is a complex problem in a wide field. In addition to his pointers, you might find it useful to look into some information retrieval techniques like the vector space model, vector space classification and latent semantic indexing as starting points. Also, the field of word sense disambiguation deals a lot with feature representation issues in NLP.
[Not a direct answer] It all depends on what you are try to parse and then process, but for general short human phrase processing (e.g. IVT) another method is to use neural networks to learn the patterns. This can be very acurate for smallish vocubularies