How to write a query to download data from DBLP? - parsing

I want to download DBLP dataset, which consists of bibliographic data in computer science.
I want to select a list of conferences from two research areas i.e., computer security (ISI, NDSS, ARES, ACSAC FC, and SP) and information retrieval (AIRS, CIKM, SIGIR, JCDL, ICTIR, ECIR, TREC, and WSDM).
Although DBLP dataset is available on https://aminer.org/citation (V4), I want to avoid parsing by using query as we use on Web of Science.

Get the DBLP XML dump from https://dblp.org/faq/1474679.html
This is the recommended way to extract larger parts from DBLP. You can easily get per-author bibliographies, but not entire conference series, except by using this.
Then 3xyradt whatever parts you want to use.

Related

Best way to store processed text data for streaming to gensim?

I've got several hundred pandas data frames, each of which has a column of very long strings that need to be processed/sentencized and finally tokenized before modeling with word2vec.
I can store them in any format on the disk, before I build a stream to pass them to gensim's word2vec function.
What format would be best, and why? The most important criterion would be performance vis-a-vis training (which will take many days), but coherent structure to the filesystem would also be nice.
Would it be crazy to store several million or maybe even a few billion text files containing one sentence each? Or perhaps some sort of database? If this was numerical data I'd use hdf5. But it's text. The cleanest would be to store them in the original data frames, but that seems less ideal from an i/o perspective, because I'd have to load each data frame (largish) every epoch.
What makes the most sense here?
As you do your preprocessing/tokenization of all the source data that you want to be part of a single training session, append the results to a single plain-text file.
Use space-separated words, and end each 'sentence' (or any other useful text-chunk that's less than 10,000 words long) with a newline.
Then you can use the corpus_file option for specifying your pre-tokenized training data, and will get the maximum possible multithreading benefit. (That mode will direct each thread to open its own view into a range of the single file, so there's no blocking on any distributor thread.)

General principle to implement node-based workflow as seen in Unreal, Blender, Alteryx and the like?

This topic is difficult to Google, because of "node" (not node.js), and "graph" (no, I'm not trying to make charts).
Despite being a pretty well rounded and experienced developer, I can't piece together a mental model of how these sorts of editors get data in a sensible way, in a sensible order, from node to node. Especially in the Alteryx example, because a Sort module, for example, needs its entire upstream dataset before proceeding. And some nodes can send a single output to multiple downstream consumers.
I was able to understand trees and what not in my old data structures course back in the day, and successfully understand and adapt the basic graph concepts from https://www.python.org/doc/essays/graphs/ in a real project. But that was a static structure and data weren't being passed from node to node.
Where should I be starting and/or what concept am I missing that I could use implement something like this? Something to let users chain together some boxes to slice and dice text files or data records with some basic operations like sort and join? I'm using C#, but the answer ought to be language independent.
This paradigm is called Dataflow Programming, it works with stream of data which is passed from instruction to instruction to be processed.
Dataflow programs can be programmed in textual or visual form, and besides the software you have mentioned there are a lot of programs that include some sort of dataflow language.
To create your own dataflow language you have to:
Create program modules or objects that represent your processing nodes realizing different sort of data processing. Processing nodes usually have one or multiple data inputs and one or multiple data output and implement some data processing algorithm inside them. Nodes also may have control inputs that control how given node process data. A typical dataflow algorithm calculates output data sample from one or many input data stream values as for example FIR filters do. However processing algorithm also can have data values feedback (output values in some way are mixed with input values) as in IIR filters, or accumulate values in some way to calculate output value
Create standard API for passing data between processing nodes. It can be different for different kinds of data and controlling signals, but it must be standard because processing nodes should 'understand' each other. Data usually is passed as plain values. Controlling signals can be plain values, events, or more advanced controlling language - depending of your needs.
Create arrangement to link your nodes and to pass data between them. You can create your own program machinery or use some standard things like pipes, message queues, etc. For example this functional can be implemented as a tree-like structure whose nodes are your processing nodes, and have references to next nodes and its appropriate input that process data coming from the output of the current node.
Create some kind of nodes iterator that starts from begin of the dataflow graph and iterates over each processing node where it:
provides next data input values
invokes node data processing methods
updates data output value
pass updated data output values to inputs of downstream processing nodes
Create a tool for configuring nodes parameters and links between them. It can be just a simple text file edited with text editor or a sophisticated visual editor with GUI to draw dataflow graph.
Regarding your note about Sort module in Alteryx - perhaps data values are just accumulated inside this module and then sorted.
here you can find even more detailed description of Dataflow programming languages.

Beam/Dataflow design pattern to enrich documents based on database queries

Evaluating Dataflow, and am trying to figure out if/how to do the following.
My apologies if anything in the above is trivial--trying to wrap our heads around Dataflow before we make a decision on using Beam, or something else like Spark, etc.
General use case is for machine learning:
Ingesting documents which are individually processed.
In addition to easy-to-write transforms, we'd like to enrich each document based on queries against databases (that are largely key-value stores).
A simple example would be a gazetteer: decompose the text into ngrams, and then check if those ngrams reside in some database, and record (within a transformed version of the original doc) the entity identifier given phrases map to.
How to do this efficiently?
NAIVE (although possibly tricky with the serialization requirement?):
Each document could simply query the database individually (similar to Querying a relational database through Google DataFlow Transformer), but, given that most of these are simple key-value stores, it seems like there should be a more efficient way to do this (given the real problems with database query latency).
SCENARIO #1: Improved?:
Current strawman is to store the tables in Bigquery, pull them down (https://github.com/apache/beam/blob/master/sdks/python/apache_beam/io/gcp/bigquery.py), and then use them as side inputs, that are used as key-value lookups within the per-doc function(s).
Key-value tables range from generally very small to not-huge (100s of MBs, maybe low GBs). Multiple CoGroupByKey with same key apache beam ("Side inputs can be arbitrarily large - there is no limit; we have seen pipelines successfully run using side inputs of 1+TB in size") suggests this is reasonable, at least from a size POV.
1) Does this make sense? Is this the "correct" design pattern for this scenario?
2) If this is a good design pattern...how do I actually implement this?
https://github.com/apache/beam/blob/master/sdks/python/apache_beam/io/gcp/bigquery.py#L53 shows feeding the result to the document function as an AsList.
i) Presumably, AsDict is more appropriate here, for the above use case? So I'd probably need to run some transformations first on the Bigquery output to separate it into key, value tuple; and make sure that the keys are unique; and then use it as a side input.
ii) Then I need to use the side input in the function.
What I'm not clear on:
for both of these, how to manipulate the output coming off of the Bigquery pull is murky to me. How would I accomplish (i) (assuming it is necessary)? Meaning, what does the data format look like (raw bytes? strings? is there a good example I can look into?)
Similarly, if AsDict is the correct way to pass it into the func, can I just reference things like a dict normally is used in python? e.g., side_input.get('blah') ?
SCENARIO #2: Even more improved? (for specific cases):
The above scenario--if achievable--definitely does seem like it is superior continuous remote calls (given the simple key-value lookup), and would be very helpful for some of our scenarios. But if I take a scenario like a gazetteer lookup (like above)...is there an even more optimized solution?
Something like, for every doc, writing our all the ngrams as keys, with values as the underlying indices (docid+indices within the doc), and then doing some sort of join between these ngrams and the phrases in our gazeteer...and then doing another set of transforms to recover the original docs (now w/ their new annotations).
I.e., let Beam handle all of the joins/lookups directly?
Theoretical advantage is that Beam may be a lot quicker in doing this than, for each doc, looping over all of the ngrams and doing a check if the ngram is in the side_input.
Other key issues:
3) If this is a good way to do things, is there any trick to making this work well in the streaming scenario? Text elsewhere suggests that the side input caching works more poorly outside the batch scenario. Right now, we're focused on batch, but streaming will become relevant in serving live predictions.
4) Any Beam-related reason to prefer Java>Python for any of the above? We've got a good amount of existing Python code to move to Dataflow, so would heavily prefer Python...but not sure if there are any hidden issues with Python in the above (e.g., I've noticed Python doesn't support certain features or I/O).
EDIT: Strawman? for the example ngram lookup scenario (should generalize strongly to general K:V lookup)
Phrases = get from bigquery
Docs (indexed by docid) (direct input from text or protobufs, e.g.)
Transform: phrases -> (phrase, entity) tuples
Transform: docs -> ngrams (phrase, docid, coordinates [in document])
CoGroupByKey key=phrase: (phrase, entity, docid, coords)
CoGroupByKey key=docid, group((phrase, entity, docid, coords), Docs)
Then we can iteratively finalize each doc, using the set of (phrase, entity, docid, coords) and each Doc
Regarding the scenarios for your pipeline:
Naive scenario
You are right that per-element querying of a database is undesirable.
If your key-value store is able to support low-latency lookups by reusing an open connection, you can define a global connection that is initialized once per worker instead of once per bundle. This should be acceptable your k-v store supports efficient lookups over existing connections.
Improved scenario
If that's not feasible, then BQ is a great way to keep and pull in your data.
You can definitely use AsDict side inputs, and simply go side_input[my_key] or side_input.get(my_key).
Your pipeline could look something like so:
kv_query = "SELECT key, value FROM my:table.name"
p = beam.Pipeline()
documents_pcoll = p | ReadDocuments()
additional_data_pcoll = (p
| beam.io.BigQuerySource(query=kv_query)
# Make row a key-value tuple.
| 'format bq' >> beam.Map(lambda row: (row['key'], row['value'])))
enriched_docs = (documents_pcoll
| 'join' >> beam.Map(lambda doc, query: enrich_doc(doc, query[doc['key']]),
query=AsDict(additional_data_pcoll)))
Unfortunately, this has one shortcoming, and that's the fact that Python does not currently support arbitrarily large side inputs (it currently loads all of the K-V into a single Python dictionary). If your side-input data is large, then you'll want to avoid this option.
Note This will change in the future, but we can't be sure ATM.
Further Improved
Another way of joining two datasets is to use CoGroupByKey. The loading of documents, and of K-V additional data should not change, but when joining, you'd do something like so:
# Turn the documents into key-value tuples as well[
documents_kv_pcoll = (documents_pcoll
| 'format docs' >> beam.Map(lambda doc: (doc['key'], doc)))
enriched_docs = ({'docs': documents_kv_pcoll, 'additional_data': additional_data_pcoll}
| beam.CoGroupByKey()
| 'enrich' >> beam.Map(lambda x: enrich_doc(x['docs'][0], x['additional_data'][0]))
CoGroupByKey will allow you to use arbitrarily large collections on either side.
Answering your questions
You can see an example of using BigQuery as a side input in the cookbook. As you can see there, the data comes parsed (I believe that it comes in their original data types, but it may come in string/unicode). Check the docs (or feel free to ask) if you need to know more.
Currently, Python streaming is in alpha, and it does not support side inputs; but it does support shuffle features such as CoGroupByKey. Your pipeline using CoGroupByKey should work well in streaming.
A reason to prefer Java over Python is that all these features work in Java (unlimited-size side inputs, streaming side inputs). But it seems that for your use case, Python may have all you need.
Note: The code snippets are approximate, but you should be able to debug them using the DirectRunner.
Feel free to ask for clarification, or to ask about other aspects if you feel like it'd help.

Is there a design pattern to handle two parallel iterators in constant memory?

I'm trying to write a Rails action to stream data where the resulting CSV / XML / JSON file is much larger than the memory limit for the web server. The tricky part is that each item in the dataset is composed from two sources. One is a Postgres DB where I plan to open a CURSOR (or just use id > Y LIMIT X) to batch process the data. The latter is a custom data store but there is basically a cursor object I can use to batch that as well.
My problem is I'm not sure what the best way to iterate over the second data source is. I imagine I'll need a structure to open the cursor and as I consume the data in each batch I'll load the next batch.
This problem seems like it might have been solved already so I'm hoping there's an established pattern I can use.

How does "DHT search engine" work?

I'm interested in the Btdigg.org which is called a "DHT search engine". According to this article, it doesn't store any content and even has no database. Then how does it work? Doesn't it need to gather meta infos and store them in database like other normal search engines? After a user submit a query, it scans the DHT network and return the results in "real time"? Is this possible?
I don't have specific insight into BTDigg, but I believe the claim that there is not database (or something that acts like a database) is a false statement. The author of that article might have been referring to something more specific that you might encounter in a traditional torrent site, where actual .torrent files are stored for instance.
This is how a BTDigg-like site works:
You run a bunch of DHT nodes, specifically with the purpose of "eaves dropping" on DHT traffic, to be introduced to info-hashes that people talk about.
join those swarms and download the metadata (.torrent file) by using the ut_metadata extension
index the information you find in there, map it to the info-hash
Provide a front-end for that index
If you want to luxury it up a bit you can also periodically scrape the info-hashes you know about to gather stats over time and maybe also figure out when swarms die out and should be removed from the index.
So, the claim that you don't store .torrent files nor any content is true.
It is not realistic to search the DHT in real-time, because the DHT is not organized around keyword searches, you need to build and maintain the index continuously, "in the background".
EDIT:
Since this answer, an optimization (BEP 51) has been implemented in some DHT clients that lets you query which info-hashes they are hosting, significantly reducing the cost of indexing.
For a deep understanding of DHT and its applications, see Scott Wolchok's paper and presentation "Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit". He presents the autonomous search engine idea as a sidenote to his study of DHT's security:
PDF of his paper:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot10/tech/full_papers/Wolchok.pdf
His presentation at DEFCON 18 (parts 1 & 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Q_F4XmNEc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO3DfLtKPGs
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot10/tech/full_papers/Wolchok.pdf
The method used in Section 3 seems to suggest a database to store all the torrent data is required. While performance is better, it may not be a true DHT search engine.
Section 8, while less efficient, seems to be a DHT search engine as long as the keywords are the store values.
From Section 3, Bootstrapping Bittorent Search:
"The system handles user queries by treating the
concatenation of each torrent's filenames and description as a
document in the typical information retrieval model and using an
inverted index to match keywords to torrents. This has the advantage
of being well supported by popular open-source relational DBMSs. We
rank the search results according to the popularity of the torrent,
which we can infer from the number of peers listed in the DHT"
From Section 8, Related Work:
the usual approach to distributing search using a DHT is
with an inverted index, by storing each (keyword, list of matching
documents) pair as a key-value pair in the DHT. Joung et al. [17]
describe this approach and point out its performance problems: the
Zipf distribution of keywords among files results in very skewed load
balance, document information is replicated once for each keyword in
the document, and it is difficult to rank documents in a distributed
environment
It is divided into two steps.
To achieve bep_0005 protocol got infohash, you do not need to implement all protocol requires only now find_node (request), get_peers (response), announce_peer (response). Here's one of my open source dhtspider.
To achieve bep_0009 protocol got metainfo index it, here are my own a bittorrent search engine, every day can get unique infohash 300w +, effective metainfo 50w +.

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