How to check if a text has request for information - machine-learning

I have been trying to see if there are ways to classify the text if it is requesting for information. I feel like NLP is the way, is there a better approach?
For example:
Hi, Can you share your school name? <<-- Yes
What is your school name? <<-- Yes
My address is XYZ. <<-- No
What is your PIN? <<-- Yes
Thanks,
Vinod.

This can be framed as a text classification task. If you have a sufficient amount of training examples, you can train a binary classifier to predict whether a sentence is asking for any information.
If you do not have a dataset, you may consider forming a dataset using natural language sentences and natural language questions. I assume a sentence that asks for information is basically a question. So, in essence, you want to identify if a sentence is a question or not.
You may also consider predicting a sentence as a question based on patterns. For example, sentences start with an interrogative word are questions. You can have additional rules to identify a question pattern.

Related

Finding contradictory semantic sentences through natural language processing

I'm working on a project that aims to find conflicting Semantic Sentences (NLP - Semantic Search )
For example
Our text is: "I ate today. The lunch was very tasty. I was an honest guest."
Query: "I had lunch with my friend"
Do we want to give the query model and find the meaning of the sentences with a certain point in terms of synonyms and antonyms?
The solution that came to my mind was to first find the synonymous sentences and extract the key words from the synonymous sentences and then get the semantic opposite words and then find the semantic synonymous sentences based on these opposite words.
Do you think this idea is possible? If you have a solution or experience in this area, please reply
Thanks
You have not mentioned the exact use case for your problem so I am not sure if the solution I know will help your cause. But there is an approach in NLP (using Deep learning) which helps to find whether two sentences are correlated, unrelated or contradictory.
Below is the information about the pretrained model which is trained specifically for this task ->
https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-mnli
The dataset on which the above model is trained is given here ->
https://huggingface.co/datasets/glue/viewer/mnli/train
You can check the dataset to verify if your use case is related to the classification task performed on the dataset.
Since the model is already pretrained, you do not need to perform any training and can jump straight to evaluation. Once you can somewhat satisfied with the results, you can fine tune the model a bit for your specific problem.
We can talk in comments if you need more clarification.

Natural Language Processing techniques for understanding contextual words

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

Retrieving the top 5 sentences- Algorithm if any present

I am new to Data Science. This could be a dumb question, but just want to know opinions and confirm if I could enhance it well.
I have a question getting the most common/frequent 5 sentences from the database. I know I could gather all the data (sentences) into a list and using the Counter library - I could fetch the most occurring 5 sentences, but I am interested to know if any algorithm (ML/DL/NLP) is present for such a requirement. All the sentences are given by the user. I need to know his top 5 (most occurring/frequent) sentences (not phrases please)!!
Examples of sentences -
"Welcome to the world of Geeks"
"This portal has been created to provide well written subject"
"If you like Geeks for Geeks and would like to contribute"
"to contribute at geeksforgeeks org See your article appearing on "
"to contribute at geeksforgeeks org See your article appearing on " (occurring for the second time)
"the Geeks for Geeks main page and help thousands of other Geeks."
Note: All my sentences in my database are distinct (contextual wise and no duplicates too). This is just an example for my requirement.
Thanks in Advance.
I'd suggest you to start with sentence embeddings. Briefly, it returns a vector for a given sentence and it roughly represents the meaning of the sentence.
Let's say you have n sentences in your database and you found the sentence embeddings for each sentence so now you have n vectors.
Once you have the vectors, you can use dimensionality reduction techniques such as t-sne to visualize your sentences in 2 or 3 dimensions. In this visualization, sentences that have similar meanings should ideally be close to each other. That may help you pinpoint the most-frequent sentences that are also close in meaning.
I think one problem is that it's still hard to draw boundaries to the meanings of sentences since meaning is intrinsically subjective. You may have to add some heuristics to the process I described above.
Adding to MGoksu's answer, Once you get sentence embeddings, you can apply LSH(Locality Sensitive Hashing) to group the embeddings into clusters.
Once you get the clusters of embeddings. It would be a trivial to get the clusters with highest number of vectors.

what methods are there to classify documents?

I am trying to do document classification. But I am really confused between feature selections and tf-idf. Are they the same or two different ways of doing classification?
Hope somebody can tell me? I am not really sure that my question will make sense to you guys.
Yes, you are confusion a lot of things.
Feature selection is the abstract term for choosing features (0 or 1). Stopword removal can be seen as feature selection.
TF is one method of extracting features from text: counting words.
IDF is one method of assigning weights to features.
Neither of them is classification... they are popular for text classification, but they are even more popular for information retrieval, which is not classification...
However, many classifiers work on numeric data, so the common process is to 1. Extract features (e.g.: TF) 2. Select features (e.g. remove stopwords) 3. Weight features (e.g. IDF) 4. Train a classifier on the resulting numerical vectors. 5. Predict the classes of new/unlabeled documents.
Taking a look at this explanation may help a lot when it comes to understanding text classifiers.
TF-IDF is a good way to find a document that answers a given query, but it does not necessarily assigns documents with classes.
Examples that may be helpful:
1) You have a bunch of documents with subjects ranging from politics, economics, computer science and the arts. The documents belonging to each subject are separated into the appropriate directories for each subject (you have a labeled dataset). Now, you received a new document whose subject you do not know. In which directory should it be stored? A classifier can answer this question from the documents that are already labeled.
2) Now, you received a query regarding computer science. For instance, you received the query "Good methods for finding textual similarity". Which document in the directory of computer science can provide the best response to that query? TF-IDF would be a good approach to figure that out.
So, when you are classifying documents, you are trying to make a decision about whether a document is a member of a particular class (like, say, 'about birds' or 'not about birds').
Classifiers predict the value of the class given a set of features. A good set of features will be highly discriminative - they will tell you a lot about whether the document is of one class or another.
Tf-idf (term frequency inverse document frequency) is a particular feature that seems to be discriminative for document classification tasks. There are others, like word counts (tf or term frequency) or whether a regexp matches the text or what have you.
Feature selection is the task of selecting good (discriminative) features. Tfidf is probably a good feature to select.

Choosing Features to identify Twitter Questions as "Useful"

I collect a bunch of questions from Twitter's stream by using a regular expression to pick out any tweet that contains a text that starts with a question type: who, what, when, where etc and ends with a question mark.
As such, I end up getting several non-useful questions in my database like: 'who cares?', 'what's this?' etc and some useful ones like: 'How often is there a basketball fight?', 'How much does a polar bear weigh?' etc
However, I am only interested in useful questions.
I have got about 3000 questions, ~2000 of them are not useful, ~1000 of them are useful that I have manually label them. I am attempting to use a naive Bayesian classifier (that comes with NLTK) to try to classify questions automatically so that I don't have to manually pick out the useful questions.
As a start, I tried choosing the first three words of a question as a feature but this doesn't help very much. Out of 100 questions the classifier predicted only around 10%-15% as being correct for useful questions. It also failed to pick out the useful questions from the ones that it predicted not useful.
I have tried other features such as: including all the words, including the length of the questions but the results did not change significantly.
Any suggestions on how I should choose the features or carry on?
Thanks.
Some random suggestions.
Add a pre-processing step and remove stop-words like this, a, of, and, etc.
How often is there a basketball fight
First you remove some stop words, you get
how often basketball fight
Calculate tf-idf score for each word (Treating each tweet as a document, to calculate the score, you need the whole corpus in order to get document frequency.)
For a sentence like above, you calculate tf-idf score for each word:
tf-idf(how)
tf-idf(often)
tf-idf(basketball)
tf-idf(fight)
This might be useful.
Try below additional features for your classifier
average tf-idf score
median tf-idf score
max tf-idf score
Furthermore, try a pos-tagger and generate a categorized sentence for each tweet.
>>> import nltk
>>> text = nltk.word_tokenize(" How often is there a basketball fight")
>>> nltk.pos_tag(text)
[('How', 'WRB'), ('often', 'RB'), ('is', 'VBZ'), ('there', 'EX'), ('a', 'DT'), ('basketball', 'NN'), ('fight', 'NN')]
Then you have possibly additional features to try that related to pos-tags.
Some other features that might be useful, see paper - qtweet (that is a paper for tweet question identification) for details.
whether the tweet contains any url
whether the tweet contains any email or phone number
whether there is any strong feeling such as ! follows the question.
whether unigram words present in the contexts of tweets.
whether the tweet mentions other user's name
whether the tweet is a retweet
whether the tweet contains any hashtag #
FYI, the author of qtweet attempted 4 different classifiers, namely, Random Forest, SVM, J48 and Logistic regression. Random forest performed best among them.
Hope they help.
A most likely very powerful feature you could try and build (Not sure if its possible) is it there is a reply to the tweet in question.

Resources