Is there a way to generate a one-sentence summarization of Q&A pairs?
For example, provided:
Q: What is the color of the car?
A: Red
I want to generate a summary as
The color of the car is red
Or, given
Q: Are you a man?
A: Yes
to
Yes, I am a man.
which accounts for both question and answer.
What would be some of the most reasonable ways to do this?
I had to once work on solving the opposite problem, i.e. generating questions out of sentences from Wikipedia articles.
I used the Stanford Parser to generate parse trees out of all possible sentences in my training dataset.
e.g.
Go to http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp
Enter "The color of the car is red." and click "Parse".
Then look at the Parse section of the response. The first layer of that sentence is NP VP (noun phrase followed by a verb phrase).
The second layer is NP PP VBZ ADJP.
I basically collected these patterns across 1000s of sentences, sorted them how common each patter was, and then used figured out how to best modify this parse tree to convert into each sentence in a different Wh-question (What, Who, When, Where, Why, etc)
You could you easily do something very similar. Study the parse trees of all of your training data, and figure out what patterns you could extract to get your work done. In many cases, just replacing the Wh word from the question with the answer would give you a valid albeit somewhat awkwardly phrases sentence.
e.g. "Red is the color of the car."
In the case of questions like "Are you a man?" (i.e. primary verb is something like 'are', 'can', 'should', etc), swapping the first 2 words usually does the trick - "You are a man?"
I don't know any NLP task that explicitly handles your requirement.
Broadly, there are two kinds of questions. Questions that expect a passage as the answer such as definition or explain sort: What is Ebola Fever. The second type are fill in the blank which are referred to as Factoid Questions in the literature such as What is the height of Mt. Everest?. It is not clear what kind of question you would like to summarize. I am assuming you are interested in factoid questions as your examples refer to only them.
A very similar problem arises in the task of Question Answering. One of the first stages of this task is to generate query. In the paper: An Exploration of the Principles Underlying
Redundancy-Based Factoid Question
Answering; Jimmy Lin 2007, the author claims that better performance can be achieved by reformulating the query (see section 4.1) to the form more likely to appear in free text. Let me copy some of the examples discussed in the paper.
1. What year did Alaska became a state?
2. Alaska became a state ?x
1. Who was the first person to run the miles in less than four minutes?
2. The first person to run the miles in less than four minutes was ?x
In the above examples, the query in 1 is reformulated to 2. As you might have already observed, ?x is the blank that should be filled by the answer. This reformulation is carried out through a dozen hand-written rules and are built into the software tool discussed in the paper: ARANEA. All you have to do is to find the tool and use it, the paper is a good ten years old, I cannot promise you anything though :)
Hope this helps.
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I have a 2-million long list of names of Podcasts. Also, I have a huge text corpus scraped from a sub-Reddit (Posts, comments, threads etc.) where the podcasts from our list are being mentioned a lot by the users. The task I'm trying to solve is, I've to count the number of mentions by each name in our corpora. In other words, generate a dictionary of (name: count) pairs.
The challenge here is that most of these Podcast names are several words long, For eg: "Utah's Noon News"; "Congress Hears Tech Policy Debates" etc. However, the mentions which Reddit users make are often a crude substring of the original name, for eg: "Utah Noon/ Utah New" or "Congress Tech Debates/ Congress Hears Tech". This makes identifying names from the list quite difficult.
What I've Tried:
First, I processed and concatenated all the words in the original podcast names into a single word. For instance,
"Congress Hears Tech Policy Debates" -> "Congresshearstechpolicydebates"
As I traversed the subreddit corpus, whenever I found a named-entity or a potential podcast name, I processed its words like this,
"Congress Hears Tech" (assuming this is what I found in the corpora) -> "congresshearstech"
I compared this "congresshearstech" string to all the processed names in the podcast list. I make this comparison using scored calculated on word-spelling similarity. I did this using difflib Python library. Also, there are similarity scores like Leveshtein and Hamming Distance. Eventually, I rewarded the podcast name with similarity score maximum to our corpus-found string.
My problem:
The thing is, the above strategy is infact working accurately. However, it's way too slow to do for the entire corpus. Also, my list of names is way too long. Can anyone please suggest a faster algorithm/data structure to compare so many names on such a huge corpus? Is there any deep learning based approach possible here? Something like where I can train a LSTM on the 2 million Podcast names. So, that whenever a possible name is encountered, this trained model can output the closest spelling of any Podcast from our list?
You may be able to use something like tf-idf and cosine similarity to solve this problem. I'm not familiar with any approach to use machine learning that would be helpful here.
This article gives a more detailed description of the process and links to some useful libraries. You should also read this article which describes a somewhat similar project to yours and includes information on improving performance. I'll describe the method as I understand it here.
tf-idf is an acronym meaning "term frequency inverse document frequency". Essentially, you look at a subset of text and find the frequency of the terms in your subset relative to the frequency of those terms in the entire corpus of text. Terms that are common in your subset and in the corpus as a whole will have a low value, whereas terms that are common in your subset but rare in the corpus would have a high value.
If you can compute the tf-idf for a "document" (or subset of text) you can turn a subset of text into a vector of tf-idf values. Once you have this vector you can use it to compute the cosine-similarity of your text subset with other subsets. Say, find the similarity of an excerpt from reddit with all of your titles. (There is a way to manage this so you aren't continuously checking each reddit excerpt against literally every title - see this post).
Once you can do this then I think the solution is to pick some value n, and scan through the reddit posts n words at a time doing the tf-idf / cosine similarity scan on your titles and marking matches when the cosine-similarity is higher than a certain value (you'll need to experiment with this to find what gives you a good result). Then, you decrement n and repeat until n is 0.
If exact text matching (with or without your whitespace removal preprocessing) is sufficient, consider the Aho-Corasick string matching algorithm for detecting substring matches (i.e. the podcast names) in a body of text (i.e. the subreddit content). There are many implementations of this algorithm for python, but ahocorapy has a good readme that summarizes how to use it on a dataset.
If fuzzy matching is a requirement (also matching when the mention text of the podcast name is not an exact match), then consider a fuzzy string matching library like thefuzz (aka fuzzywuzzy) if per query-document operations offer sufficient performance. Another approach is to precompute n-grams from the substrings and accumulate the support counts across all n-grams for each document as the fuzzyset package does.
If additional information about the podcasts is available in a knowledge base (i.e. more than just the name is known), then the problem is more like the general NLP task of entity linking but to a custom knowledge base (i.e. the podcast list). This is an area of active research and state of the art methods are discussed on NLP Progress here.
I am experimenting with machine learning in general, and Bayesian analysis in particular, by writing a tool to help me identify my collection of e-books. The input data consist of a set of e-book files, whose names and in some cases contents contain hints as to the book they correspond to.
Some are obvious to the human reader, like:
Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach 3rd.pdf
Microsoft Press - SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out.pdf
The Complete Guide to PC Repair 5th Ed [2011].pdf
Hamlet.txt
Others are not so obvious:
Vsphere5.prc (Actually 'Mastering VSphere 5' by Scott Lowe)
as.ar.pdf (Actually 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand)
Rather than try to code various parsers for different formats of file names, I thought I would build a few dozen simple rules, each with a score.
For example, one rule would look in the first few pages of the file for something resembling an ISBN number, and if found would propose a hypothesis that the file corresponds to the book identified by that ISBN number.
Another rule would look to see if the file name is in 'Author - Title' format and, if so, would propose a hypothesis that the author is 'Author' and the title is 'Title'. Similar rules for other formats.
I thought I could also get a list of book titles and authors from Amazon or an ISBN database, and search the file name and first few pages of the file for any of these; any matches found would result in a hypothesis being suggested by that rule.
In the end I would have a set of tuples like this:
[rulename,hypothesis]
I expect that some rules, such as the ISBN match, will have a high probability of being correct, when they are available. Other rules, like matches based on known book titles and authors, would be more common but not as accurate.
My questions are:
Is this a good approach for solving this problem?
If so, is Bayesian analysis a good candidate for combining all of these rules' hypotheses into compound score to help determine which hypothesis is the strongest, or most likely?
Is there a better way to solve this problem, or some research paper or book which you can suggest I turn to for more information?
It depends on the size of your collection and the time you want to spend training the classifier. It will be difficult to get good generalization that will save you time. For any type of classifier you will have to create a large training set, and also find a lot of rules before you get good accuracy. It will probably be more efficient (less false positives) to create the rules and use them only to suggest title alternatives for you to choose from, and not to implement the classifier. But, if the purpose is learning, then go ahead.
Summary
I am trying to design a heuristic for matching up sentences in a translation (from the original language to the translated language) and would like guidance and tips. Perhaps there is a heuristic that already does something similar? So given two text files, I would like to be able to match up the sentences (so I can pick out a sentence and say this is the translation of that sentence).
Details
The input text would be translated novels. So I do not expect the translations to be literal, although, using something like google translate might be a good way to test the accuracy of the heuristic.
To help me, I have a library that will gloss the contents of the translated text and give me the definitions of the words in the sentence. Other things I know:
Chapters and order are preserved; I know that the first sentence in chapter three will match with the first sentence in chapter three of the translation (Note, this is not strictly true; the first sentence might match up with the first two sentences, or even the second sentence)
I can calculate the overall size (characters, sentences, paragraphs); which could give me an idea of the average difference in sentence size (for example, the translation might be 30% longer).
Looking at the some books I have, the translated version has about 30% more sentences than the original text.
Implementation
(if it matters)
I am planning to do this in Java - but I am not that fussed - any language will do.
I am not greatly concerned about speed.
I guess to to be sure of the matches, some user feedback might be required. Like saying "Yes, this sentence definitely matches with that sentence." This would give the heuristic some more ground to stand on. This would mean that the user would need a little proficiency in the languages.
Background
(for those interested)
The reason I want to make this is that I want it to assist with my foreign language study. I am studying Japanese and find it hard to find "good" material (where "good" is defined by what I like). There are already tools to do something similar with subtitles from videos (an easier task - using the timing information of the video). But nothing, as far as I know, for texts.
There are tools called "sentence aligners" used in NLP research that does exactly what you want.
I advise hunalign:
http://mokk.bme.hu/resources/hunalign/
and MS sentence aligner:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/aafd5dcf-4dcc-49b2-8a22-f7055113e656/
Both are quite OK, but remember that nothing is perfect. Sentences that are too hard to be aligned will be dropped and some sentences may be wrongly aligned.
Here's the problem -- I have a few thousand small text snippets, anywhere from a few words to a few sentences - the largest snippet is about 2k on disk. I want to be able to compare each to each, and calculate a relatedness factor so that I can show users related information.
What are some good ways to do this? Are there known algorithms for doing this that are any good, are there any GPL'd solutions, etc?
I don't need this to run in realtime, as I can precalculate everything. I'm more concerned with getting good results than runtime.
I just thought I would ask the Stack Overflow community before going and writing my own thing. There HAVE to be people out there who have found good solutions to this before.
These articles on semantic relatedness and semantic similarity may be helpful. And this SO question about Latent Semantic Analysis.
You could also look into Soundex for words that "sound alike" phonetically.
I've never used it, but you might want to look into Levenshtein distance
Jeff talked about something like this on the pod cast to find the Related questions listed on the right side here. (in podcast 32)
One big tip was to remove all common words, like "the" "and" "this" etc. This will leave you with more meaningful words to compare.
And here is a similar question Is there an algorithm that tells the semantic similarity of two phrases
This is quite doable for reasonable large texts, however harder for smaller texts.
I did it once like this, and it worked pretty well:
Filter all "general" words (like a, an, the, in, etc...) (filters about 10-30% of the words)
Count the frequencies of the remaining words, store the top x of most frequent words, these are your topics.
As an extra step you can create groups of 2/3/4 subsequent words and compare them with the groups in other texts. I used it as a measure for plagerism.
See Manning and Raghavan course notes about MinHashing and searching for similar items, and a C#(?) version. I believe the techniques come from Ullman and Motwani's research.
This book may be relevant.
Edit: here is a related SO question
Phonetic algorithms
The article, Beyond SoundEx - Functions for Fuzzy Searching in MS SQL Server, shows how to install and use the SimMetrics library into SQL Server. This library lets you find relative similarity between strings and includes numerous algorithms.
I ended up mostly using Jaro Winkler to match on names. Here's more information where I asked about matching names on SO: Matching records based on Person Name
A few algorithms based on Levenshtein Distance are also available in the SimMetric library and would probably be useful in your application.
I need to parse recipe ingredients into amount, measurement, item, and description as applicable to the line, such as 1 cup flour, the peel of 2 lemons and 1 cup packed brown sugar etc. What would be the best way of doing this? I am interested in using python for the project so I am assuming using the nltk is the best bet but I am open to other languages.
I actually do this for my website, which is now part of an open source project for others to use.
I wrote a blog post on my techniques, enjoy!
http://blog.kitchenpc.com/2011/07/06/chef-watson/
The New York Times faced this problem when they were parsing their recipe archive. They used an NLP technique called linear-chain condition random field (CRF). This blog post provides a good overview:
"Extracting Structured Data From Recipes Using Conditional Random Fields"
They open-sourced their code, but quickly abandoned it. I maintain the most up-to-date version of it and I wrote a bit about how I modernized it.
If you're looking for a ready-made solution, several companies offer ingredient parsing as a service:
Zestful (full disclosure: I'm the author)
Spoonacular
Edamam
I guess this is a few years out, but I was thinking of doing something similar myself and came across this, so thought I might have a stab at it in case it is useful to anyone else in f
Even though you say you want to parse free test, most recipes have a pretty standard format for their recipe lists: each ingredient is on a separate line, exact sentence structure is rarely all that important. The range of vocab is relatively small as well.
One way might be to check each line for words which might be nouns and words/symbols which express quantities. I think WordNet may help with seeing if a word is likely to be a noun or not, but I've not used it before myself. Alternatively, you could use http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Ingredients as a word list, though again, I wouldn't know exactly how comprehensive it is.
The other part is to recognise quantities. These come in a few different forms, but few enough that you could probably create a list of keywords. In particular, make sure you have good error reporting. If the program can't fully parse a line, get it to report back to you what that line is, along with what it has/hasn't recognised so you can adjust your keyword lists accordingly.
Aaanyway, I'm not guaranteeing any of this will work (and it's almost certain not to be 100% reliable) but that's how I'd start to approach the problem
This is an incomplete answer, but you're looking at writing up a free-text parser, which as you know, is non-trivial :)
Some ways to cheat, using knowledge specific to cooking:
Construct lists of words for the "adjectives" and "verbs", and filter against them
measurement units form a closed set, using words and abbreviations like {L., c, cup, t, dash}
instructions -- cut, dice, cook, peel. Things that come after this are almost certain to be ingredients
Remember that you're mostly looking for nouns, and you can take a labeled list of non-nouns (from WordNet, for example) and filter against them.
If you're more ambitious, you can look in the NLTK Book at the chapter on parsers.
Good luck! This sounds like a mostly doable project!
Can you be more specific what your input is? If you just have input like this:
1 cup flour
2 lemon peels
1 cup packed brown sugar
It won't be too hard to parse it without using any NLP at all.