#Lexical pattern extractor#
##Introduction##
This tool allows to generate a set of words that appear in the same contexts as a seed list that you can provide as input. The process consists of 2 steps
- Generation of patterns from a seed list
- Extraction of candidate words from the previous list of patterns
The current tool only words for Dutch, as it makes use of the Google Web 5-gram Database for Dutch, hosted in http://www.let.rug.nl/gosse/bin/Web1T5_freq.perl to get frequencies for n-grams. It could be easily adapted to a new language or domain, providing a new source for getting ngram frequencies in that new domain/language.
##Installation##
This tools is completely developed in python, so you need python installed in your machine (recommended version 2.7). It also uses some functionality of our python library VUA_pylib which can be found at https://github.com/cltl/VUA_pylib. You will need to clone first this library and make sure it is on the python path or a folder where python can find it.
Then to install the tool you need to clone the github repository from: https://github.com/cltl/lexical_pattern_extractor
Basic installation:
$ cd your_local_folder
$ git clone https://github.com/cltl/lexical_pattern_extractor.git
$ cd lexical_pattern_extractor
$ git clone https://github.com/cltl/VUA_pylib.git
You will need to have installed NLTL (http://www.nltk.org) as well.
##Usage of the tool##
There are 2 python scripts that perform the two tasks mentioned above:
- create_patterns.py
- generate_candidate_words.py
All the configuration options are provided on a configuration file that must follow this format:
[general]
output_folder = my_folder
seeds = toeristisch;interessante
measure = pmi
ngram_len = 3
percent_selected_patterns = 25
accept_patterns_with_at_least_num_seeds = 1
stop_words_for_patterns = UNK;KKK
min_patterns_per_candidate = 2
[templates]
t1=* een #X#
t2=* * ##X
t3=#X# * *
[google_web_query]
limit_per_query_pattern_extraction = 25
min_freq_for_hit_pattern_extraction = 40
limit_per_query_candidate_selection = 123
min_freq_for_hit_candidate_selection = 50
The options under general are:
- output_folder: output folder where you want to store all the generated data
- measure: the type of measure used to compute the association pattern - word. The possible features can be found at http://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.metrics.html#nltk.metrics.association.BigramAssocMeasures and the possible names must be the same than in NLTK (pmi,chi_sq...)
- seeds: List of ; separated seeds
- ngram_len: Length of ngrams to generate, with 5 it will use 5-grams, 4-grams, 3-grams and 2-grams (only if no template section is included, and default templates are generated
- percent_selected_patterns: Percentage of first patterns sorted according to PMI to be selected
- accept_patterns_with_at_least_num_seeds: Minimum number of seed that a pattern must be found with to be considered as active
- stop_words_for_patterns: includes a list of stop words (separated by ;). Patterns containing any of these stop words (case sensi used in the create_patterns.py (optional)
- min_patterns_per_candidate: minimum number of patterns that a candidate word must appear with to be selected (optional, if not included by default all candidate words extracted will be selected)
Options google_web_query:
- limit_per_query_pattern_extraction: Limit in the query for ngrams (for the step of pattern extractiong from seeds)
- min_freq_for_hit_pattern_extraction: Minimum frequency allowed for one n-gram (for the step of pattern extractiong from seeds)
- limit_per_query_candidate_selection: Limit in the query for ngrams (for the step of candidate words generation from patterns)
- min_freq_for_hit_candidate_selection: Minimum frequency allowed for one n-gram (for the step of candidate words generation from patterns)
Options for section template (this whole section is optional, if not included default templates will be generated)
- List of lines with id=template including an #X# that will be replaced by the seed for performing the queries
##create_patterns.py##
This script will extract the patterns, and will be stored under FOLDER(specified on config)/extracted_patterns.xml. This file will be used in the extraction of candidate words, so it might be modified and edited before running the second part. This file is a XML file with this format:
patterns>
<pattern active="1" num="0" pmi="12.5489661749">
<value>webpagina * duitsland</value>
<seed pmi="12.5489661749" word="toeristisch"/>
</pattern>
....
For each extracted patter it is shown the overall PMI value (calculated from the pmi associated with each seed), if the pattern is active or not (depending on the configuration, if it's in the first percentaga of selected patterns and if appears with the minimum number of seeds set), the value of the pattern itself and each of the seeds that the pattern has been found with (and the pmi of this relation). To active/deactivate a pattern, the value of the "active" attribute has be changed to 1/0. All patterns set to active (active="1") will be used later in the extraction of target words.
The create_pattern.py stores all the results of individual queries made to the web service under the folder $FOLDER/cached_result, to avoid querying the web service more than one time for the same query. You can rerun the create_patterns.py in case of error, and if you dont remove the folder, all these cached results will be available and the process will be faster.
##generate_candidate_words.py##
This script takes the list of active patterns from the file $FOLDER/extracted_patterns.xml and extract a set of candidate words. The final list of candidate words will be:
- Printed on the screen
- Stored as a CSV file on the file $FOLDER/candidate_words.csv
- Stored as a XML file on the file $FOLDER/candidate_words.xml
This XML will be like:
<words>
<word pmi="10.143692306">
<value>ontmoeting</value>
<pattern pmi="9.94395216888" pattern="vond een *"/>
<pattern pmi="10.3434324431" pattern="tot een *"/>
</word>
<word pmi="10.073567218">
<value>grap</value>
<pattern pmi="10.3474522659" pattern="dit een *"/>
<pattern pmi="9.79968217009" pattern="was een *"/>
</word>
...
</words>
Each candidate word is represented as a "word" element, with the total "pmi" as an attribute. The actual candidate word string is stored in the subelement "value", and each of the patterns from where this candidate word was extracted, are represented as a "pattern" element, containing the pmi value of association of the word with the pattern in each case.
#Quick start#
An example of usage of the tool would be:
$ joe my_config.cfg
$ python create_patterns.py my_config.cfg > log.out 2> log.err &
$ joe FOLDER/extracted_patterns.xml
$ python generate_candidate_words.py my_config.cfg > log.out 2> log.err &
#Last features included#
- 16th-dec-2013: included [general].stop_words_for_patterns in the config
- 16th-dec-2013: included [templates] in the configuration file
- 17th-dec-2013: included different parameters for querying google for pattern extraction and target extraction
- 17th-dec-2013: included parameter min_patterns_per_candidate for restricting the output
- 17th-dec-2013: generate_candidate creates an XML also
#Contact#
- Rubén Izquierdo Beviá
- Vrije University of Amsterdam
- ruben.izquierdobevia@vu.nl