Lecture 2. Tokenization and word counts

Ekaterina Chernyak, Dmitry Ilvovsky

How many words?

"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." 9 tokens: The, rain, in, Spain, stays, mainly, in, the, plain 7 (or 8) types: T = the rain, in, Spain, stays, mainly, plain

Type and token

Type is an element of the vocabulary.

Token is an instance of that type in the text.

N = number of tokens;

V - vocabulary (i.e. all types);

|V| = size of vocabulary (i.e. number of types).

How are N and |V| related?

Zipf's law

Zipf's law ([Gelbukh, Sidorov, 2001])

In any large enough text, the frequency ranks (starting from the highest) of types are inversely proportional to the corresponding frequencies:

f = 1/r

f — frequency of a type;

r — rank of a type (its position in the list of all types in order of their frequency of occurrence).

Zipf's law: example

Heaps' law

Heaps' law ([Gelbukh, Sidorov, 2001])

The number of different types in a text is roughly proportional to an exponent of its size:

N = number of tokens;

|V| = size of vocabulary (i.e. number of types);

K, b — free parameters, K ∈ [10; 100]; b ∈ [0.4; 0.6]

Why tokenization is difficult?

• Easy example: "Good muffins cost $3.88 in New York. Please buy me two of them. Thanks."
  • is \." a token?
  • is $3.88 a single token?
  • is \New York" a single token?
• Real data may contain noise in it: code, markup, URLs, faulty punctuation
• Real data contains misspellings: "an dthen she aksed"
• Period "." does not always mean the end of sentence: m.p.h., PhD.

Nevertheless tokenization is important for all other text processing steps. There are rule-based and machine learning-based approaches to development of tokenizers.

Rule-based tokenization

For example, define a token as a sequence of upper and lower case letters: A-Za-z. Reqular expression is a nice tool for programming such rules.

RE in Python

In[1]: import re

In[2]: prog = re.compile('[A-Za-z]+')

In[3]: prog.findall("Words, words, words.")

Out[1]: ['Words', 'words', 'words']

Sentence segmentation

What are the sentence boundaries?

•  ?, ! are usually unambiguous
• Period "." is an issue
• Direct speech is also an issue: She said, "What time will you be home?" and I said, "I don't know!". Even worse in Russian!

Let us learn a classifier for sentence segmentation.

Binary classifier

A binary classifier f : X ⇒ 0; 1 takes input data X (a set of sentences) and decides EndOfSentence (0) or NotEndOfSentence (1).

What can be the features for classification? I am a period, am I EndOfSentence?

• Lots of blanks after me?
• Lots of lower case letters and ? or ! after me?
• Do I belong to abbreviation?
• etc.

We need a lot of hand-markup.

Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)

Do we need to program this? No! There is Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) for everything.

NLTK tokenizers

In[1]: from nltk.tokenize import RegexpTokenizer, wordpunct tokenize

In[2]: s = 'Good muffins cost $3.88 in New York. Please buy me two of them. Thanks.'

In[3]: tokenizer = RegexpTokenizer('\w+ | \$ [\d \.]+ | S \+')

In[4]: tokenizer.tokenize(s)

In[5]: wordpunct tokenize(s)

Learning to tokenize

nltk.tokenize.punkt is a tool for learning to tokenize from your data. It includes pre-trained Punkt tokenizer for English.

Punkt tokenizer

In[1]: import nltk.data

In[2]: sent detector = nltk.data.load('tokenizers/punkt/english.pickle')

In[3]: sent detector.tokenize(s)

Exercise 1.1 Word counts

Input: Alice in Wonderland (alice.txt) or your text

Output 1: number of tokens

Output 2: number of types

Use nltk.FreqDist() to count types. nltk.FreqDist() is a frequency dictionary: [key, frequency(key)].

Lemmatization (Normalization)

Each word has a base form:

• has, had, have ⇒ have
• cats, cat, cat's ⇒ cat
• Windows ⇒ window or Windows?

Lemmatization [Jurafsky, Martin, 1999]

Lemmatization (or normalization) is used to reduce in ections or variant forms to base forms. A dictionary with headwords is required.

Lemmatization

In[1]: from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer

In[2]: lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()

In[3]: lemmatizer.lemmatize(t)

Stemming

A word is built with morphems: word = stem + affixes. Sometimes we do not need affixes.

translate, translation, translator ⇒ translat

Stemming [Jurafsky, Martin, 1999]

Reduce terms to their stems in information retrieval and text classification. Porter's algorithm is the most common English stemmer.

Stemming

In[1]: from nltk.stem.porter import PorterStemmer

In[2]: stemmer = PorterStemmer()

In[3]: stemmer.stem(t)

Exercise 1.2 Word counts (continued)

Input: Alice in Wonderland (alice.txt) or your text

Output 1: 20 most common lemmata

Output 2: 20 most common stems

Use FreqDist() to count lemmata and stems. Use FreqDist().most common() to find most common lemmata and stems.

Exercise 1.3 Do we need all words?

Stopword is a not meaningful word: prepositions, adjunctions, pronouns, articles, etc.

Stopwords

In[1]: from nltk.corpus import stopwords

In[2]: print stopwords.words('english')

Exercise 1.3

Input: Alice in Wonderland (alice.txt) or your text

Output 1: 20 most common lemmata without stop words

Use not in operator to exclude not stopwords in a cycle.