Embeddings with recurrent neural networks - embedding

I am working on a research project on text data (it's about search engine queries supervised classification). I have already implemented different methods and I have also used different models for the text (such as binary vectors of the dimention of my vocabulary - 1 if the i-th word appears in the text, 0 otherwise - or words embedding with the model word2vec).
My advisor told me that maybe we could find another representation of the queries using Recurrent Neural Network. This representation should keep into account the sequentiality of the words in the text thanks to the recurrence relation. I have read some documentation about RNN but I haven't find anything useful for this goal. I have read lot of things about language modelling (which predict probabilities of the words), but I don't understand how I could adapt this model in order to obtain something like an embedded vector.
Thank you very much!

Usually, if one wants to obtain embeddings from a query or a sentence exploiting RNN, the logits are used. The logits are simply the output values of the network after the forward pass of the full sentence/query.
The logit values produce a vector that has the dimensions of the output layer (i.e. number of the target classes): usually, it is the vocabulary, since they are extracted from a language model.
For hints have a look at these:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07012
How does word2vec give one hot word vector from the embedding vector?
Note that in principle one could use also use bidirectional networks or networks trained on other tasks, obtaining smaller embeddings, even if this last option is kind of fancy and it has not been explored up to my knowledge.

Related

Data augmentation for text classification

What is the current state of the art data augmentation technic about text classification?
I made some research online about how can I extend my training set by doing some data transformation, the same we do on image classification.
I found some interesting ideas such as:
Synonym Replacement: Randomly choose n words from the sentence that does not stop words. Replace each of these words with one of its synonyms chosen at random.
Random Insertion: Find a random synonym of a random word in the sentence that is not a stop word. Insert that synonym into a random place in the sentence. Do this n times.
Random Swap: Randomly choose two words in the sentence and swap their positions. Do this n times.
Random Deletion: Randomly remove each word in the sentence with probability p.
But nothing about using pre-trained word vector representation model such as word2vec. Is there a reason?
Data augmentation using a word2vec might help the model to get more data based on external information. For instance, replacing a toxic comment token randomly in the sentence by its closer token in a pre-trained vector space trained specifically on external online comments.
Is it a good method or do I miss some important drawbacks of this technic?
Your idea of using word2vec embedding usually helps. However, that is a context-free embedding. To go one step further, the state of the art (SOTA) as of today (2019-02) is to use a language model trained on large corpus of text and fine-tune your own classifier with your own training data.
The two SOTA models are:
GPT-2 https://github.com/openai/gpt-2
BERT https://github.com/google-research/bert
These data augmentation methods you mentioned might also help (depends on your domain and the number of training examples you have). Some of them are actually used in the language model training (for example, in BERT there is one task to randomly mask out words in a sentence at pre-training time). If I were you I would first adopt a pre-trained model and fine tune your own classifier with your current training data. Taking that as a baseline, you could try each of the data augmentation method you like and see if they really help.

Is doc vector learned through PV-DBOW equivalent to the average/sum of the word vectors contained in the doc?

I've seen some posts say that the average of the word vectors perform better in some tasks than the doc vectors learned through PV_DBOW. What is the relationship between the document's vector and the average/sum of its words' vectors? Can we say that vector d
is approximately equal to the average or sum of its word vectors?
Thanks!
No. The PV-DBOW vector is calculated by a different process, based on how well the PV-DBOW-vector can be incrementally nudged to predict each word in the text in turn, via a concurrently-trained shallow neural network.
But, a simple average-of-word-vectors often works fairly well as a summary vector for a text.
So, let's assume both the PV-DBOW vector and the simple-average-vector are the same dimensionality. Since they're bootstrapped from exactly the same inputs (the same list of words), and the neural-network isn't significantly more sophisticated (in its internal state) than a good set of word-vectors, the performance of the vectors on downstream evaluations may not be very different.
For example, if the training data for the PV-DBOW model is meager, or meta-parameters not well optimized, but the word-vectors used for the average-vector are very well-fit to your domain, maybe the simple-average-vector would work better for some downstream task. On the other hand, a PV-DBOW model trained on sufficient domain text could provide vectors that outperform a simple-average based on word-vectors from another domain.
Note that FastText's classification mode (and similar modes in Facebook's StarSpace) actually optimizes word-vectors to work as parts of a simple-average-vector used to predict known text-classes. So if your end-goal is to have a text-vector for classification, and you have a good training dataset with known-labels, those techniques are worth considering as well.

Character-Word Embeddings from lm_1b in Keras

I would like to use some pre-trained word embeddings in a Keras NN model, which have been published by Google in a very well known article. They have provided the code to train a new model, as well as the embeddings here.
However, it is not clear from the documentation how to retrieve an embedding vector from a given string of characters (word) from a simple python function call. Much of the documentation seems to center on dumping vectors to a file for an entire sentence presumably for sentimental analysis.
So far, I have seen that you can feed in pretrained embeddings with the following syntax:
embedding_layer = Embedding(number_of_words??,
out_dim=128??,
weights=[pre_trained_matrix_here],
input_length=60??,
trainable=False)
However, converting the different files and their structures to pre_trained_matrix_here is not quite clear to me.
They have several softmax outputs, so I am uncertain which one would belong - and furthermore how to align the words in my input to the dictionary of words for which they have.
Is there a simple manner to use these word/char embeddings in keras and/or to construct the character/word embedding portion of the model in keras such that further layers may be added for other NLP tasks?
The Embedding layer only picks up embeddings (columns of the weight matrix) for integer indices of input words, it does not know anything about the strings. This means you need to first convert your input sequence of words to a sequence of indices using the same vocabulary as was used in the model you take the embeddings from.
For NLP applications that are related to word or text encoding I would use CountVectorizer or TfidfVectorizer. Both are announced and described in a brief way for Python in the following reference: http://www.bogotobogo.com/python/scikit-learn/files/Python_Machine_Learning_Sebastian_Raschka.pdf
CounterVectorizer can be used for simple application as a SPAM-HAM detector, while TfidfVectorizer gives a deeper insight of how relevant are each term (word) in terms of their frequency in the document and the number of documents in which appears this result in an interesting metric of how discriminant are the terms considered. This text feature extractors may consider a stop-word removal and lemmatization to boost features representations.

How does Fine-tuning Word Embeddings work?

I've been reading some NLP with Deep Learning papers and found Fine-tuning seems to be a simple but yet confusing concept. There's been the same question asked here but still not quite clear.
Fine-tuning pre-trained word embeddings to task-specific word embeddings as mentioned in papers like Y. Kim, “Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification,” and K. S. Tai, R. Socher, and C. D. Manning, “Improved Semantic Representations From Tree-Structured Long Short-Term Memory Networks,” had only a brief mention without getting into any details.
My question is:
Word Embeddings generated using word2vec or Glove as pretrained word vectors are used as input features (X) for downstream tasks like parsing or sentiment analysis, meaning those input vectors are plugged into a new neural network model for some specific task, while training this new model, somehow we can get updated task-specific word embeddings.
But as far as I know, during the training, what back-propagation does is updating the weights (W) of the model, it does not change the input features (X), so how exactly does the original word embeddings get fine-tuned? and where do these fine-tuned vectors come from?
Yes, if you feed the embedding vector as your input, you can't fine-tune the embeddings (at least easily). However, all the frameworks provide some sort of an EmbeddingLayer that takes as input an integer that is the class ordinal of the word/character/other input token, and performs a embedding lookup. Such an embedding layer is very similar to a fully connected layer that is fed a one-hot encoded class, but is way more efficient, as it only needs to fetch/change one row from the matrix on both front and back passes. More importantly, it allows the weights of the embedding to be learned.
So the classic way would be to feed the actual classes to the network instead of embeddings, and prepend the entire network with a embedding layer, that is initialized with word2vec / glove, and which continues learning the weights. It might also be reasonable to freeze them for several iterations at the beginning until the rest of the network starts doing something reasonable with them before you start fine tuning them.
One hot encoding is the base for constructing initial layer for embeddings. Once you train the network one hot encoding essentially serves as a table lookup. In fine-tuning step you can select data for specific works and mention variables that need to be fine tune when you define the optimizer using something like this
embedding_variables = tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.TRAINABLE_VARIABLES, scope="embedding_variables/kernel")
ft_optimizer = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(learning_rate=0.001,name='FineTune')
ft_op = ft_optimizer.minimize(mean_loss,var_list=embedding_variables)
where "embedding_variables/kernel" is the name of the next layer after one-hot encoding.

How to include words as numerical feature in classification

Whats the best method to use the words itself as the features in any machine learning algorithm ?
The problem I have to extract word related feature from a particular paragraph. Should I use the index in the dictionary as the numerical feature ? If so, how will I normalize these ?
In general, How are words itself used as features in NLP ?
There are several conventional techniques by which words are mapped to features (columns in a 2D data matrix in which the rows are the individual data vectors) for input to machine learning models.classification:
a Boolean field which encodes the presence or absence of that word in a given document;
a frequency histogram of a
predetermined set of words, often the X most commonly occurring words from among all documents comprising the training data (more about this one in the
last paragraph of this Answer);
the juxtaposition of two or more
words (e.g., 'alternative' and
'lifestyle' in consecutive order have
a meaning not related either
component word); this juxtaposition can either be captured in the data model itself, eg, a boolean feature that represents the presence or absence of two particular words directly adjacent to one another in a document, or this relationship can be exploited in the ML technique, as a naive Bayesian classifier would do in this instanceemphasized text;
words as raw data to extract latent features, eg, LSA or Latent Semantic Analysis (also sometimes called LSI for Latent Semantic Indexing). LSA is a matrix decomposition-based technique which derives latent variables from the text not apparent from the words of the text itself.
A common reference data set in machine learning is comprised of frequencies of 50 or so of the most common words, aka "stop words" (e.g., a, an, of, and, the, there, if) for published works of Shakespeare, London, Austen, and Milton. A basic multi-layer perceptron with a single hidden layer can separate this data set with 100% accuracy. This data set and variations on it are widely available in ML Data Repositories and academic papers presenting classification results are likewise common.
Standard approach is the "bag-of-words" representation where you have one feature per word, giving "1" if the word occurs in the document and "0" if it doesn't occur.
This gives lots of features, but if you have a simple learner like Naive Bayes, that's still OK.
"Index in the dictionary" is a useless feature, I wouldn't use it.
tf-idf is a pretty standard way of turning words into numeric features.
You need to remember to use a learning algorithm that supports numeric featuers, like SVM. Naive Bayes doesn't support numeric features.

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