Learnig NER using category list - machine-learning

In the template for training CRF++, how can I include a custom dictionary.txt file for listed companies, another for popular European foods, for eg, or just about any category.
Then provide a sample training data for each category whereby it learns how those specific named entites are used within a context for that category.
In this way, I as well as the system, can be sure it correctly understood how certain named entites are structured in a text, whether a tweet or a Pulitzer prize winning news article, instead of providing hundred megabytes of data.
This would be rather cool. Model would have a definite dictionary of known entites (which does not need to be expanded) and a statistical approach on how those known entites are structured in human text.
PS - Just for clarity, not yearning for a regex ner. These are only cool if you got lots in the dictionary, lots of rule and lots of dulltime.

I think what you are talking about is Gazetteers list (dictionary.txt).
You would have to include corresponding feature for a word in training data and then specify it in template file.
For Example: Your list contains the entity: Hershey's
and training data has a sentence: I like Hershey's chocolates.
So when you arrange the data in CoNLL Format (for CRF++), you can add a column (which shall have values 0 or 1 , indicating is the word is present in dictionary) which will have 0 value for all words, except Hershey's.
You also have to include this column as feature in template file.
To get a better understanding on Template File and NER training with CRF++, you can watch the below videos and comment your doubts :)
1) https://youtu.be/GJHeTvDkIaE
2) https://youtu.be/Ur5umC4BwN4
EDIT: (after viewing the OP's comment)
Sample Training Data with extra features: https://pastebin.com/fBgu8c67
I've added 3 features. The IsCountry feature value ( 1 or 0 ) can be obtained from a Gazetteers list of countries. The other 2 features can be computed offline. Note that Headers are added in file for reference only, should not be include in training data file.
Sample Template File for the above data : https://pastebin.com/LPvAGCVL
Note that, Test Data should also be in the same format as Train Data, with the same features / same no of columns.

Related

How much data / context needed to train custom NER Spacy model?

I am trying to extract previous Job titles from a CV using spacy and named entity recognition.
I would like to train spacy to detect a custom named entity type : 'JOB'. For that I have around 800 job title names from https://www.careerbuilder.com/browse/titles/ that I can use as training data.
In my training data for spacy, do I need to integrate these job titles in sentences added to provide context or not?
In general in the CV the job title kinda stands on it's own and is not really part of a full sentence.
Also, if I need to provide coherent context for each of the 800 titles, it will be too time-consuming for what I'm trying to do, so maybe there are other solutions than NER?
Generally, Named Entity Recognition relies on the context of words, otherwise the model would not be able to detect entities in previously unseen words. Consequently, the list of titles would not help you to train any model. You could rather run string matching to find any of those 800 titles in CV documents and you will even be guaranteed to find all of them - no unknown titles, though.
I you could find 800 (or less) real CVs and replace the Job names by those in your list (or others!), then you are all set to train a model capable of NER. This would be the way to go, I suppose. Just download as many freely available CVs from the web and see where this gets you. If it is not enough data, you can augment it, for example by exchanging the job titles in the data by some of the titles in your list.

Query-document similarity with doc2vec

Given a query and a document, I would like to compute a similarity score using Gensim doc2vec.
Each document consists of multiple fields (e.g., main title, author, publisher, etc)
For training, is it better to concatenate the document fields and treat each row as a unique document or should I split the fields and use them as different training examples?
For inference, should I treat a query like a document? Meaning, should I call the model (trained over the documents) on the query?
The right answer will depend on your data & user behavior, so you'll want to try several variants.
Just to get some initial results, I'd suggest combining all fields into a single 'document', for each potential query-result, and using the (fast-to-train) PV-DBOW mode (dm=0). That will let you start seeing results, doing either some informal assessment or beginning to compile some automatic assessment data (like lists of probe queries & docs that they "should" rank highly).
You could then try testing the idea of making the fields separate docs – either instead-of, or in addition-to, the single-doc approach.
Another option might be to create specialized word-tokens per field. That is, when 'John' appears in the title, you'd actually preprocess it to be 'title:John', and when in author, 'author:John', etc. (This might be in lieu of, or in addition to, the naked original token.) That could enhance the model to also understand the shifting senses of each token, depending on the field.
Then, providing you have enough training data, & choose other model parameters well, your search interface might also preprocess queries similarly, when the user indicates a certain field, and get improved results. (Or maybe not: it's just an idea to be tried.)
In all cases, if you need precise results – exact matches of well-specified user queries – more traditional searches like exact DB matches/greps, or full-text reverse-indexes, will outperform Doc2Vec. But when queries are more approximate, and results need filling-out with near-in-meaning-even-if-not-in-literal-tokens results, a fuzzier vector document representation may be helpful.

Handling a missing value in machine learning

I was analyzing a dataset in which i have column names as follows: [id , location, tweet, target_value]. I want to handle the missing values for column location in some rows. So i thought to extract location from tweet column from that row(if tweet contains some location) itself and put that value in the location column for that row.
Now i have some questions regarding above approach.
Is this a good way to do it this way?. Can we fill some missing values by using the training data itself?. Will not this be considered as a redundant feature(because we are deriving the values of this feature using some other feature)
Can you please clarify your dataset a little bit more?
First, If we assume that the location is the information of the tweet that has been posted from, then your method (filling out the location columns in the rows in which that information is missing) becomes wrong.
Secondly, if we assume that the tweet contains the location information correctly, then you can fill out the missing rows using the tweets' location information.
If our second assumption is correct, then it would be a good way because you are feeding your dataset with correct information. In other words, you are giving the model a more detailed information so that it could predict more correctly in the testing process.
Regarding to your question about "Will not this be considered as a redundant feature(because we are deriving the values of this feature using some other feature)":
You can try to remove the location column from your model and train your model with the rest of your 3 columns. Then, you can check the success of the new model using different parameters (accuracy etc.). You can compare it with the results of the model that you have trained using all 4 different columns. After that, if there is not any important difference or the results become severe, then you would say it, the column is redundant. Also you can use Principal Component Analysis(PCA) to detect correlated columns.
Finally, please NEVER use training data in your test dataset. It will lead to overtraining and when you use your model in the real world environment, your model will most probably fail.

Searching for list of terms using Google in order to build a bag-of-words for a particular category

I am having a hard time understanding the process of building a bag-of-words. This will be a multiclass classfication supervised machine learning problem wherein a webpage or a piece of text is assigned to one category from multiple pre-defined categories. Now the method that I am familiar with when building a bag of words for a specific category (for example, 'Math') is to collect a lot of webpages that are related to Math. From there, I would perform some data processing (such as remove stop words and performing TF-IDF) to obtain the bag-of-words for the category 'Math'.
Question: Another method that I am thinking of is to instead search in google for something like 'List of terms related to Math' to build my bag-of-words. I would like to ask if this is method is okay?
Another question: In the context of this question, does bag-of-words and corpus mean the same thing?
Thank you in advance!
This is not what bag of words is. Bag of words is the term to describe a specific way of representing a given document. Namely, a document (paragraph, sentence, webpage) is represented as a mapping of form
word: how many times this word is present in a document
for example "John likes cats and likes dogs" would be represented as: {john: 1, likes: 2, cats: 1, and: 1, dogs: 1}. This kind of representation can be easily fed into typical ML methods (especially if one assumes that total vocabulary is finite so we end up with numeric vectors).
Note, that this is not about "creating a bag of words for a category". Category, in typical supervised learning would consist of multiple documents, and each of them independently is represented as a bag of words.
In particular this invalidates your final proposal of asking google for words that are related to category - this is not how typical ML methods work. You get a lot of documents, represent them as bag of words (or something else) and then perform statistical analysis (build a model) to figure out the best set of rules to discriminate between categories. These rules usually will not be simply "if the word X is present, this is related to Y".

Which machine learning model should be used in this situation?

Recently I'm working on my course project, it's an android app that can automatically help fill consuming form based on the user's voice. So here is one sample sentence:
So what I want to do is let the app fill forms automatically, my forms have several fields: time(yesterday), location(MacDonald), cost(10 dollars), type(food). Here the "type" field will include food, shopping, transport, etc.
I have used the word-splitting library to split the sentence into several parts and parse it, so I can already extract the time, location and cost fields from the user's voice.
What I want to do is deduce the "type" field with some kind of machine learning model. So there should be some records in advance, input by user manually to train the model. After training, when new record comes in, I first extract the time, location and cost fields, and then calculate the type field based on the model.
But I don't know how to represent the location field, should I use a dictionary to include many famous locations and use index to represent the location? If so, which kind of machine learning method should I use to model this requirement?
I would start with the Naive Bayes classifier. The links below should be useful in understanding it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier
http://cs229.stanford.edu/notes/cs229-notes2.pdf
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/naive_bayes.html
I wonder if time and cost are that discriminative/informative in comparison to location for your task.
In general, look at the following link on working with text data (it should be useful even if you dont know python):
http://scikit-learn.org/dev/tutorial/text_analytics/working_with_text_data.html
It should include three stages:
Feature Representation:
One way to represent the features is the Bag-of-Word representation, which you fix an order of the dictionary and use a word frequency vector to represent the documents. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-of-words_model for details.
Data and Label Collection:
Basically, in this stage, you should prepare some [feature]-[type] pairs to training your model, which can be tedious or expensive. If you had already published your app, and collected a lot of [sentence]-[type] pair (probably chosen by app user), you can extract the features and build a training set.
Model Learning:
Cdeepakroy has suggested a good choice of the model: Naive Bayes, which is very efficient for classification task like this. At this stage, you can just find a suitable package, insert your training data, and enjoy the classifier it returns.

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