I'm working on a project that requires NLP. The scenario involves two or more participants exchanging messages in a chat app. I want to use am NLP/ML model to auto-tag message for the participants' emotions as the conversation is happening (e.g happy, sad, anger, frustrated, I'm not looking for sentiment analysis). My prior knowledge of NLP is limited, and I had a hard time finding the right model to use.
I found this repo conv-emotion and spent almost two days trying to make it work. Currently reaching out to the authors for help. I like their repo is because it's the model is applied on a conversation level. But unfortunately, their README isn't well written.
Any suggestions going forward? Do you know any model or even API that I can use? Am I on the right track?
For sentiment analysis, I think to go for Gated CNN will get you quite a good result. And pair it with some rules and you'd be fine. Try reading this paper : https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P18-1234/
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[I'm approaching this as an outsider to machine learning. It just seems like a classification problem which I should be able to solve with fairly good accuracy with Machine Larning.]
Training Dataset:
I have millions of URLs, each tagged with a particular category. There are limited number of categories (50-100).
Now given a fresh URL, I want to categorize it into one of those categories. The category can be determined from the URL using conventional methods, but would require a huge unmanageable mess of pattern matching.
So I want to build a box where INPUT is URL, OUTPUT is Category. How do I build this box driven by ML?
As much as I would love to understand the basic fundamentals of how this would work out mathematically, right now much much more focussed on getting it done, so a conceptual understanding of the systems and processes involved is what I'm looking to get. I suppose machine learning is at a point where you can approach reasonably straight forward problems in that manner.
If you feel I'm wrong and I need to understand the foundations deeply in order to get value out of ML, do let me know.
I'm building this inside an AWS ecosystem so I'm open to using Amazon ML if it makes things quicker and simpler.
I suppose machine learning is at a point where you can approach reasonably straight forward problems in that manner.
It is not. Building an effective ML solution requires both an understanding of problem scope/constraints (in your case, new categories over time? Runtime requirements? Execution frequency? Latency requirements? Cost of errors? and more!). These constraints will then impact what types of feature engineering / processing you may look at, and what types of models you will look at. Your particular problem may also have issues with non I.I.D. data, which is an assumption of most ML methods. This would impact how you evaluate the accuracy of your model.
If you want to learn enough ML to do this problem, you might want to start looking at work done in Malicious URL classification. An example of which can be found here. While you could "hack" your way to something without learning more about ML, I would not personally trust any solution built in that manner.
If you feel I'm wrong and I need to understand the foundations deeply in order to get value out of ML, do let me know.
Okay, I'll bite.
There are really two schools of thought currently related to prediction: "machine learners" versus statisticians. The former group focuses almost entirely on practical and applied prediction, using techniques like k-fold cross-validation, bagging, etc., while the latter group is focused more on statistical theory and research methods. You seem to fall into the machine-learning camp, which is fine, but then you say this:
As much as I would love to understand the basic fundamentals of how this would work out mathematically, right now much much more focussed on getting it done, so a conceptual understanding of the systems and processes involved is what I'm looking to get.
While a "conceptual understanding of the systems and processes involved" is a prerequisite for doing advanced analytics, it isn't sufficient if you're the one conducting the analysis (it would be sufficient for a manager, who's not as close to the modeling).
With just a general idea of what's going on, say, in a logistic regression model, you would likely throw all statistical assumptions (which are important) to the wind. Do you know whether certain features or groups shouldn't be included because there aren't enough observations in that group for the test statistic to be valid? What can happen to your predictions and hypotheses when you have high variance-inflation factors?
These are important considerations when doing statistics, and oftentimes people see how easy it is to do from sklearn.svm import SVC or somthing like that and run wild. That's how you get caught with your pants around your ankles.
How do I build this box driven by ML?
You don't seem to have even a rudimentary understanding of how to approach machine/statistical learning problems. I would highly recommend that you take an "Introduction to Statistical Learning"- or "Intro to Regression Modeling"-type course in order to think about how you translate the URLs you have into meaningful features that have significant power predicting URL class. Think about how you can decompose a URL into individual pieces that might give some information as to which class a certain URL pertains. If you're classifying espn.com domains by sport, it'd be pretty important to parse nba out of http://www.espn.com/nba/team/roster/_/name/cle, don't you think?
Good luck with your project.
Edit:
To nudge you along, though: every ML problem boils down to some function mapping input to output. Your outputs are URL classes. Your inputs are URLs. However, machines only understand numbers, right? URLs aren't numbers (AFAIK). So you'll need to find a way to translate information contained in the URLs to what we call "features" or "variables." One place to start, there, would be one-hot encoding different parts of each URL. Think of why I mentioned the ESPN example above, and why I extracted info like nba from the URL. I did that because, if I'm trying to predict to which sport a given URL pertains, nba is a dead giveaway (i.e. it would very likely be highly predictive of sport).
My question is related to the project I've just started working on, and it's a ChatBot.
The bot I want to build has a pretty simple task. It has to automatize the process of purchasing movie tickets. This is pretty close domain and the bot has all the required access to the cinema database. Of course it is okay for the bot to answer like “I don’t know” if user message is not related to the process of ordering movie tickets.
I already created a simple demo just to show it to a few people and see if they are interested in such a product. The demo uses simple DFA approach and some easy text matching with stemming. I hacked it in a day and it turned out that users were impressed that they are able to successfully order tickets they want. (The demo uses a connection to the cinema database to provide users all needed information to order tickets they desire).
My current goal is to create the next version, a more advanced one, especially in terms of Natural Language Understanding. For example, the demo version asks users to provide only one information in a single message, and doesn’t recognize if they provided more relevant information (movie title and time for example). I read that an useful technique here is called "Frame and slot semantics", and it seems to be promising, but I haven’t found any details about how to use this approach.
Moreover, I don’t know which approach is the best for improving Natural Language Understanding. For the most part, I consider:
Using “standard” NLP techniques in order to understand user messages better. For example, synonym databases, spelling correction, part of speech tags, train some statistical based classifiers to capture similarities and other relations between words (or between the whole sentences if it’s possible?) etc.
Use AIML to model the conversation flow. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to use AIML in such a closed domain. I’ve never used it, so that’s the reason I’m asking.
Use a more “modern” approach and use neural networks to train a classifier for user messages classification. It might, however, require a lot of labeled data
Any other method I don’t know about?
Which approach is the most suitable for my goal?
Do you know where I can find more resources about how does “Frame and slot semantics” work in details? I'm referring to this PDF from Stanford when talking about frame and slot approach.
The question is pretty broad, but here are some thoughts and practical advice, based on experience with NLP and text-based machine learning in similar problem domains.
I'm assuming that although this is a "more advanced" version of your chatbot, the scope of work which can feasibly go into it is quite limited. In my opinion this is a very important factor as different methods widely differ in the amount and type of manual effort needed to make them work, and state-of-the-art techniques might be largely out of reach here.
Generally the two main approaches to consider would be rule-based and statistical. The first is traditionally more focused around pattern matching, and in the setting you describe (limited effort can be invested), would involve manually dealing with rules and/or patterns. An example for this approach would be using a closed- (but large) set of templates to match against user input (e.g. using regular expressions). This approach often has a "glass ceiling" in terms of performance, but can lead to pretty good results relatively quickly.
The statistical approach is more about giving some ML algorithm a bunch of data and letting it extract regularities from it, focusing the manual effort in collecting and labeling a good training set. In my opinion, in order to get "good enough" results the amount of data you'll need might be prohibitively large, unless you can come up with a way to easily collect large amounts of at least partially labeled data.
Practically I would suggest considering a hybrid approach here. Use some ML-based statistical general tools to extract information from user input, then apply manually built rules/ templates. For instance, you could use Google's Parsey McParseface to do syntactic parsing, then apply some rule engine on the results, e.g. match the verb against a list of possible actions like "buy", use the extracted grammatical relationships to find candidates for movie names, etc. This should get you to pretty good results quickly, as the strength of the syntactic parser would allow "understanding" even elaborate and potentially confusing sentences.
I would also suggest postponing some of the elements you think about doing, like spell-correction, and even stemming and synonyms DB - since the problem is relatively closed, you'll probably have better ROI from investing in a rule/template-framework and manual rule creation. This advice also applies to explicit modeling of conversation flow.
I have developed a ML model for a classification (0/1) NLP task and deployed it in production environment. The prediction of the model is displayed to users, and the users have the option to give a feedback (if the prediction was right/wrong).
How can I continuously incorporate this feedback in my model ? From a UX stand point you dont want a user to correct/teach the system more than twice/thrice for a specific input, system shld learn fast i.e. so the feedback shld be incorporated "fast". (Google priority inbox does this in a seamless way)
How does one build this "feedback loop" using which my system can improve ? I have searched a lot on net but could not find relevant material. any pointers will be of great help.
Pls dont say retrain the model from scratch by including new data points. Thats surely not how google and facebook build their smart systems
To further explain my question - think of google's spam detector or their priority inbox or their recent feature of "smart replies". Its a well known fact that they have the ability to learn / incorporate (fast) user feed.
All the while when it incorporates the user feedback fast (i.e. user has to teach the system correct output atmost 2-3 times per data point and the system start to give correct output for that data point) AND it also ensure it maintains old learnings and does not start to give wrong outputs on older data points (where it was giving right output earlier) while incorporating the learning from new data point.
I have not found any blog/literature/discussion w.r.t how to build such systems - An intelligent system that explains in detaieedback loop" in ML systems
Hope my question is little more clear now.
Update: Some related questions I found are:
Does the SVM in sklearn support incremental (online) learning?
https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/1073/libraries-for-online-machine-learning
http://mlwave.com/predicting-click-through-rates-with-online-machine-learning/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_drift
Update: I still dont have a concrete answer but such a recipe does exists. Read the section "Learning from the feedback" in the following blog Machine Learning != Learning Machine. In this Jean talks about "adding a feedback ingestion loop to machine". Same in here, here, here4.
There could be couple of ways to do this:
1) You can incorporate the feedback that you get from the user to only train the last layer of your model, keeping the weights of all other layers intact. Intuitively, for example, in case of CNN this means you are extracting the features using your model but slightly adjusting the classifier to account for the peculiarities of your specific user.
2) Another way could be to have a global model ( which was trained on your large training set) and a simple logistic regression which is user specific. For final predictions, you can combine the results of the two predictions. See this paper by google on how they do it for their priority inbox.
Build a simple, light model(s) that can be updated per feedback. Online Machine learning gives a number of candidates for this
Most good online classifiers are linear. In which case we can have a couple of them and achieve non-linearity by combining them via a small shallow neural net
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/126546/nonlinear-dynamic-online-classification-looking-for-an-algorithm
I want to program a robot which will sense obstacles and learn whether to cross over them or bypass around them.
Since my project, must be realized in week and a half period, I must use an online learning algorithm (GA or such would take a lot time to test because robot needs to try to cross over the obstacle in order to determine is it possible to cross).
I'm really new to online learning so I don't really know which online learning algorithm to use.
It would be a great help if someone could recommend me a few algorithms that would be the best for my problem and some link with examples wouldn't hurt.
Thanks!
I think you could start with A* (A-Star)
It's simple and robust, and widely used.
There are some nice tutorials on the web like this http://www.raywenderlich.com/4946/introduction-to-a-pathfinding
Online algorithm is just the one that can collect new data and update a model incrementally without re-training with full dataset (i.e. it may be used in online service that works all the time). What you are probably looking for is reinforcement learning.
RL itself is not a method, but rather general approach to the problem. Many concrete methods may be used with it. Neural networks have been proved to do well in this field (useful course). See, for example, this paper.
However, to create real robot being able to bypass obstacles you will need much then just knowing about neural networks. You will need to set up sensors carefully, preprocess data from them, work out your model and collect a dataset. Not sure it's possible to even learn it all in a week and a half.
I’m reading towards M.Sc. in Computer Science and just completed first year of the source. (This is a two year course). Soon I have to submit a proposal for the M.Sc. Project. I have selected following topic.
“Suitability of machine learning for document ranking in information retrieval system”. Researchers have been using various machine learning algorithms for ranking documents. So as the first phase of the project I will be doing a complete literature survey and finding out advantages/disadvantages of current approaches. In the second phase of the project I will be proposing a new (modified) algorithm in order to overcome the limitations of current approaches.
Actually my question is whether this type of project is suitable as a M.Sc. project? Moreover if somebody has some interesting idea in information retrieval filed, is it possible to share those ideas with me.
Thanks
Ranking is always the hardest part of any of Information Retrieval systems. I think it is a very good topic but you have to take care to -- as soon as possible -- to define a scope of the work. Probably you will not be able to develop a new IR engine but rather build a prototype based on, e.g., apache lucene.
Currently there is a lot of dataset including stackoverflow data dump, which provide you all information you need to define a rich feature vector (number of points, time, you can mine topics of previous question etc., popularity of a tag) for you machine learning ranking algorithm. In this part of the work you could, e.g., classify types of features (e.g., user specific, semantic feature - software name in the title) and perform series of experiments to learn which features are most important and which are not for a given dataset.
The second direction of such a project can be how to perform learning efficiently. The reason behind is the quantity of data within web or community forums and changes in the forum (this would be important if you take a community specific features), e.g., changes in technologies, new software release, etc.
There are many other topics related to search and machine learning. The best idea is to search on scholar.google.com for the recent survey papers on ranking, machine learning, and search to learn what is the state-of-the-art. The very next step would be to talk with your MSc supervisor.
Good luck!
Everything you said is good and should be done, but you forgot the most important part:
Prove that your algorithm is better and/or faster than other algorithms, with good experiments and maybe some statistics (p-value, confidence interval).
If you do that and convince people that your algorithm is useful you surely will not fail :)