2013-06-21

Free "Lisp Hackers" Ebook

More than a year passed since I had started to publish a series of interviews with Lisp hackers. It was a great project, but I'm going to finalize it for now. All of the interviews are collected in a free ebook that is available through leanpub. You should share it with your friends and on the interwebs! ;)

Below is a few observations on the whole series that I think are interesting.

The Road to Lisp

There was a famous survey on the Association of Lisp Users site called "The Road to Lisp". I have somewhat replicated it in the interview and some of the answers where quite surprising, as far as I'm concerned.

First of all, people came to Lisp through friends, who gave them a copy of SICP or showed some fascinating Lisp programs. There's also a mention of online forums (usenet, irc, etc.)

So SICP is the most influential book, followed by Peter Norvig's PAIP. The other mentioned sources are "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" by Bob Glickstein, "The UNIX-Haters Handbook", and Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages".

Two interesting things get notable mentions as leading to Lisp: computer graphics and Caml-light (for the French guys).

And receiving it as legacy from the dad is somewhat priceless!

Parens transfer

I'd also like to add my experience here: the 2 things which brought me to Lisp were Eric S. Raymond's "How to Become a Hacker" which mentioned that you need to learn Lisp to become a better programmer, and Peter Seibel's great "Practical Common Lisp", which came out after all the interviewed hackers were already into Lisp, so they couldn't have been influenced by it.

Dislikes

This was an interesting question, because it made most of the persons go out of their comfort zone a little: after all, most of them are fond of Common Lisp. And the answers are interesting, although expected.

Basically, it boils down to 3 things:

  • the arrogance of the community and/or outsiders prejudice against it
  • lack of static typing and other ways to express constraints on the program
  • disdain for the platform it lives on, which includes problems with embedding into other systems, no good way to write one-liners, etc.

Also noted were:

  • necessity to struggle to achieve high performance
  • the unspecified corners, but this problem is becoming less and less acute

A Lisp project

This was a question, proposed by Zach Beane: what Lisp project would you do if you weren't constrained in resources and other stuff. For the sake of completeness, I've also followed up with him, and here's his answer:

Right now I'd love to spend more time polishing Quicklisp. I'd love to make a good system for discovering the functionality you need (it's not easy to make the connection from "I need to fetch web pages" to "drakma"). I'd like to make interfaces for accepting user feedback and reviews. I'd like to make it easy to make connections from a project to its website, bug tracker, mailing list, documentation, etc. I'd like to publish my build tools and build logs. I'd like to make EVERYTHING a lot better, to make the system not just better than what CL had before but better than what other language ecosystems offer, too. It's all a lot of work.

As a fantasy project, I'd love to make a system for interesting visualization of complex data, something where it's easy to splat something quick and dirty on the screen/page, but which can grow in capability as the need arises. Or maybe just some tool for making audiovisual toys, with cool pictures and noises coming out.

The other interesting answers were:

  • another take on reflection
  • an OS, based on Linear Lisp, bootstrapped from Racket or Maru
  • Lisp bridges to other runtime systems
  • a Common Lisp object database
  • a Go-playing program
  • and, surely, an own Lisp dialect or even a separate programming language :)

Lisp companies

It's one of the popular myths that it's impossible to find a Lisp job. Well, it's definitely harder than to find a Java one, but speaking about the job's quality YMMV. Some of the Lisp companies were mentioned in the interviews:

  • ITA Software that employed up to 50 Lisp developers in its Boston office and was bought by Google for almost $1B
  • Franz in the Silicon Valley
  • Teclo Networks in Switzerland
  • MSI in Japan
  • Novasparks which operates from Boston and Paris

But a lot more weren't mentioned. To name a few:

  • probably, the biggest Lisp company in the world — the Portuguese SISCOG with 70+ Lisp developers
  • Clozure Associates band of Lisp gurus from the US East Coast
  • Copyleft from Norway
  • RavenPack from Spain
  • Australia's division of Accenture
  • Agri-Esprit from France

I would say, that most of them work in pretty interesting domains and with challenging problems. There are also many more one- or two-man Lisp shops scattered around the world. So, yes, Lisp companies are rare, but there's nothing wrong with relying on Lisp in a company: it doesn't fail you and may even bring some outstanding results. Not to mention the fun of the process itself...

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2013-06-12

Lisp Hackers: Marc Battyani

Marc Battyani is one of the people who put Lisp at the foundation of their business, and he doesn't seem to regret that decision. And the business itself is exploring very interesting aspects of high-performance and reconfigurable computing. Besides, he has a notable open-source contribution with cl-pdf/cl-typesetting libraries (which even I use, so thanks Marc!). He elaborates on all these and more in much detail in the interview.

Tell us something interesting about yourself.

I think maybe the most unusual things I do is that I work on very different application domains which are even sometimes completely at opposite extremes both in electronics and software. For instance form ultra low power smart sensors based on $1 microprocessors which will run continuously for 5+ years only powered by a small coin battery up to the world's lowest latency supercomputers based on FPGA costing thousands of $ per chip. On the software side I use programming languages ranging from the lowest level languages like assembly or even below with VHDL up to really high level languages like Common Lisp.

I've always enjoyed mixing electronics design and higher level computer science and all that diversity probably gives me a different and original view on say computing and programming in general.


What's your job? Tell us about your company.

I'm the CTO of NovaSparks a startup I founded in 2008 to make ultra-low latency FPGA based supercomputers for the financial markets. BTW These things are really incredibly fast. For instance on 10Gb/s Ethernet market data packets coming from exchanges like the NASDAQ we process the IP/UDP/multicast network stack, extract the messages from the packets, parse/decode/filter/normalize those messages, maintain the indexed order book data structures, aggregate the price levels per stock, generate output messages and finally send them to a server through PCI-express or 10Gb/s Ethernet network stacks. The nice thing is that we do all that fully pipelined at a rate of one message every 12 nanoseconds! To have an idea of how fast it is, in 12 ns the light will only travel 3.6 meters (11.8 ft). Another way to view this performance is that the system can process 83 Millions of financial messages per second without any queuing.

As an aside it is interesting to note that the Domain Specific Language Compilers and various other tools written in Common Lisp have been key enabling factors for the creation of NovaSparks.

I'm also the CEO and CTO of Fractal Concept which is the company where we were developing that technology before starting NovaSparks but as NovaSparks has been using more than 100% of my time for the last years Fractal Concept has been less active with only the development and maintenance of the smart sensors going on.


Do you use Lisp at work? If yes, how you've made it happen? If not, why?

I've always used Common Lisp for most of my work and even when I need to use other programming languages (like VHDL for NovaSpark's FPGAs or javascript for web stuff) I generally use Common Lisp at least for a lot of related tasks like prototyping, designing and testing algorithms, extracting statistics, performing simulations, generating test data, analysing test runs.

The next step is very often to generate some or all the code in other languages by designing various domain specific languages (DSL) which will take care of the tedious aspects of programming in less powerful languages. I really like it when from a few 100s of lines written in a easy to use high level DSL we generate 10000 to 60000+ lines of very low level VHDL code saving months of development.

About that point I think I would even say that I'm mostly doing Language Oriented Programming by trying to abstract the domain specific knowledge into various domain specific languages with very different syntaxes like s-expressions, C like or other languages or even sometimes adding to the mix some GUI or data-based inputs. Then those DSLs would generate most if not all the application code in whatever language is needed be it VHDL, asm, C, javascript or Common Lisp.


What brought you to Lisp? What holds you?

A friend of mine gave me a version of Le_Lisp a version of Lisp used in the 80's by the French universities and engineering schools to teach high level programming concepts. At that time I was mostly programming in Z80 assembly language on a TRS80 and the straight jump from ASM to Lisp was quite a shock and an eye opener.

Since then I've used Common Lisp for countless projects ranging from a few hours of work to multi-years ones and I still find it awesome. Where else can you find a language providing such powerful and multi-paradigms features like CLOS, generic functions, the MOP, macros, closures, s-expressions, lambdas, an interactive REPL (Read Eval Print Loop), native compilation of applications, on the fly native compilation of generated code, the condition system, interactive live programming, real time live debugging of running software and more!


What's the most exciting use of Lisp you had?

I've got so many of them than picking only one would be difficult so here are a few of them:
  • softscan: real time driving and data acquisition of automated non-destructive testing installations with real time 3D display (a first in 1995)
  • my web application framework: Automatic generation of really complex web applications (the whole stuff from the HTML/javascript front-end to the server back-end). It has been fully Ajax-based with dynamic modification of the displayed pages without reloading the page. This seems obvious nowadays but it was also a first in 2000 and IIRC the term "Ajax" was only invented 5 years later.
  • hpcc: The awesome DSL to VHDL compiler. In many aspects VHDL is the complete opposite of Common Lisp. It's a hardware description language used to program FPGA and it deals with the lowest possible programming level with data types like signals, clocks, and bits. Programming at that level is really tedious, time consuming and verbose so it's really a relief to be able to generate tens of thousands of lines of highly optimized VHDL code from just a few hundred lines of some high level Domain Specific Language.
  • cl-pdf/cl-typesetting: Being able to generate the first PDF files from scratch in only 107 lines of Common Lisp was an Haha moment.

What you dislike the most about Lisp?

The language itself is somewhat good enough and anyway Common Lisp makes it really easy to change most of itself to add the new and cool stuff or ideas of the day.

In fact what I dislike about Lisp is outside the language and more related to the (mis)perception that people have about it. Having almost everytime to justify its use and sometimes even to fight to be able to use it is somewhat annoying and tiresome.

Of course, Lisp is not for everybody but this is not a reason to have nobody using it. In fact I view Lisp as some kind of amplifier which will give awesome things when used by brilliant developers but will end up giving an incredible mess when used by people without any clues about what they are doing. That's one aspect that makes Lisp very different from other languages which are especially designed to try to normalize and average what people can do with them.


Describe your workflow, give some productivity tips to fellow programmers.

I obviously use emacs and all the nice stuff that work with it like slime, org-mode, magit and lots of other packages. I switched from subversion (svn) to git for all my projects and I now use git mostly form emacs with magit.

In general I have several instances of Lispworks running as standalone apps on my laptop but connected to Slime through M-x slime-connect rather than being started by slime. I do a lot of exploratory programming and interactively play with the code while I write it and if I have to optimize some code I very often use #'disassemble.

About my Lisp coding style I really do like generic functions, CLOS and the MOP. As mentioned earlier I try to generate as much of the code as possible by using macros in simple cases and full blown DSLs in more complex ones. Sometimes I do not dislike making some premature optimizations when I know that speed will be important for some project. BTW when speed matters I like to generate and compile code on the fly when it's useful (and possible) and try to generate really optimized code. It's always cool when you have Common Lisp applications running much faster than C++ ones.

I also refactor a lot. Generally when I start on some new stuff I try to make a first version that works well enough but then once it's done or generally after some time I have some cool ideas to make something much better. At that point I'm really happy that Common Lisp makes refactoring very easy thanks to optional and key args, macros and generic functions with multiple dispatch because all that enables me to make even very deep modifications very easily. I really find those Common Lisp features make software very resilient to code modifications.

What are the advantages of using Lisp in the HPC field? What are the drawbacks? Are you happy with your technology choice?

The HPC field is huge and I can only talk about the small corner of it I know which is the ultra-low latency processing of vast amounts of data we do in NovaSparks. For that the various DSL compilers generating VHDL code have really been a key enabling factor. Programming FPGAs is notoriously difficult and time consuming and this is the major factor limiting the use of reconfigurable computing in the HPC field. The use of those DSL compilers has made it possible to use those FPGA on a more practical basis for processing financial data.

BTW I'm looking for other HPC domains in which those DSL VHDL compilers could be used so feel free to contact me if you have some ideas.


If you had all the time in the world for a Lisp project, what would it be?

Again that's a difficult choice. Speaking about pure Lisp projects I've been willing for a long time to clean up and modernize my web app framework before releasing it as open-source so maybe that could be a good project to start.

Otherwise as mentioned above, I'm looking for possible applications and opportunities of leveraging the DSL => hardware compilers and the FPGAs around some Big Data processing. I have a few ideas but nothing specific for now.


Anything else I forgot to ask?

A conclusion? (Everybody wants a conclusion.) So here is mine:

Common Lisp is Awesome! It is much easier nowadays to use it thanks to all the projects and libraries that Quicklisp makes available. If you do not know Common Lisp then learn it and this will make you a better programmer anyway even if you do not use it directly after.


submit

2013-06-09

NLTK 2.1 - Working with Text Corpora

Let's return to start of chapter 2 and explore the tools needed to easily and efficiently work with various linguistic resources.

What are the most used and useful corpora? This is a difficult question to answer because different problems will likely require specific annotations and often a specific corpus. There are even special conferences dedicated to corpus linguistics.

Here's a list of the most well-known general-purpose corpora:

  • Brown Corpus - one of the first big corpora and the only one in the list really easily accessible - we've already worked with it in the first chapter
  • Penn Treebank - Treebank is a corpus of sentences annotated with their constituency parse trees so that they can be used to train and evaluate parsers
  • Reuters Corpus (not to be confused with the ApteMod version provided with NLTK)
  • British National Corpus (BNC) - a really huge corpus, but, unfortunately, not freely available

Another very useful resource which isn't structured specifically as academic corpora mentioned above, but at the same time has other dimensions of useful connections and annotations is Wikipedia. And there's being a lot of interesting linguistic research performed with it.

Besides there are two additional valuable language resources that can't be classified as text corpora at all, but rather as language databases: WordNet and Wiktionary. We have already discussed CL-NLP interface to Wordnet. And we'll touch working with Wiktionary in this part.

Processing corpora

All of the text corpora we'll encounter come as a set of files which use some format, either custom or standard (like XML). So to be able to access this data we'll need to implement reading and processing of individual files and assembling these files into groups. Besides, as some corpora are really large (for instance a zipped instance of the Reuters corpus amounts to 1.5+ Gb), it is also useful to be able to process the data one text at a time not detaining them in memory. All this defines a rather simple protocol for corpora processing.

A corpus is just a list of texts, that can be arbitrary grouped.

(defstruct corpus
  desc texts groups)

A text has a name and several representations: basic texts may have a raw, a cleaned-up and a tokenized one. We'll also see texts with other representations, like the parse trees for treebanks - we'll use structure inheritance to describe them.

(defstruct text
  name raw clean tokens)

The protocol itself comprises of 3 operations:

(defgeneric read-corpus (type path))

(defgeneric read-corpus-file (type source))

(defgeneric map-corpus (type path fn))

read-corpus creates a corpus object, and it uses read-corpus-file to read individual files and return their contents in multiple forms, potentially needed for further processing. map-corpus calls function fn with every text produced from calling read-corpus-file on a corpus in arbitrary order. This function works more like maphash than mapcar, because it doesn't collect the results of applying fn.

The methods of these functions are usually boring. For text-based formats we implement read-corpus-file by reading each file's text either in whole or line-by-line with the dolines macro, performing tokenization and some post-processing. For XML-based variants we may use SAX processing with Closure XML library.

Processing the NPS Chat corpus

Let's look at the NPS Chat corpus that is provided with NLTK. It has a rather simple XML format. The entries are called Posts and have the following structure:

<Post class="Emotion" user="10-19-30sUser2">10-19-30sUser11 lol
    <terminals>
        <t pos="NNP" word="10-19-30sUser11"/>
        <t pos="UH" word="lol"/>
    </terminals>
</Post>

We process each file by calling cxml:parse with an instance of the nps-chat-sax class.

(defmethod read-corpus-file ((type (eql :nps-chat)) source)
  (cxml:parse source (make 'nps-chat-sax)))

For this object we'll specialize the parser methods. It will also serve as a storage for state of processing as SAX parsing operates with callbacks that don't have access to the current context besides access to the parser object.

(defclass nps-chat-sax (sax:sax-parser-mixin)
  ((texts :initform nil)
   (tokens :initform nil)
   (classes :initform nil)
   (users :initform nil)
   (cur-tag :initform nil)
   (cur-tokens :initform nil)))

read-corpus-file will return a list of each post's contents, tokens, as well as the list of posts' classes and users, which are indicated in the meta attributes. Technically these values will be produced by the sax:end-document method that is called at the end of SAX processing:

(defmethod sax:end-document ((sax nps-chat-sax))
  (with-slots (texts tokens users classes) sax
    (values nil  ;; raw text isn't useful for this corpus
            (reverse texts)
            (reverse tokens)
            (reverse classes)
            (reverse users))))

In sax:start-element method we store the current tag and record attributes of each post or tokens, depending on the element.

(defmethod sax:start-element ((sax nps-chat-sax)
                              namespace-uri local-name qname attributes)
  (with-slots (classes users cur-tokens cur-tag) sax
    (case (setf cur-tag (mkeyw local-name))
      (:post (push (attr "class" attributes) classes)
             (push (attr "user" attributes) users))
      (:t (push (make-token :word (attr "word" attributes)
                            :tag (mkeyw (attr "pos" attributes)))
                cur-tokens)))))

In sax:characters we record current post's text:

(defmethod sax:characters ((sax nps-chat-sax) data)
  (with-slots (cur-tag texts) sax
    (when (eql :terminals cur-tag)
      (push data texts))))

And in sax:end-element we dump current tokens:

(defmethod sax:end-element ((sax nps-chat-sax) namespace-uri
                            local-name qname)
  (when (eql :terminals (mkeyw local-name))
    (with-slots (tokens cur-tokens) sax
      (push (reverse cur-tokens) tokens)
      (setf cur-tokens nil))))

If you have used SAX parsing in some other language, like Python, you should immediately recognize this approach and see how it can translated to that language almost line-by-line.

Processing the Reuters corpus

A slightly more complex processing is required for the Reuters corpus. The reason for that is that unlike with the Chat corpus that we assumed to be inside a filesystem directory, it's not always reasonable to extract this corpus as it's big and also is stored in two-level zip archive with individual archives packed inside another big archive. Extracting all of them is, obviously, tedious.

For such corpus it makes sense to resort to using map-corpus. Here's a definition of its method for this corpus:

(defmethod map-corpus ((type (eql :reuters)) path fn)
  (zip:with-zipfile (zip path)
    (zip:do-zipfile-entries (name entry zip)
      (unless (char= #\/ (last-char name))
        (with-zipped-zip (in entry :raw t)
          (mv-bind (_ text tokens __ ___ headline byline dateline)
              (read-corpus-file :reuters in)
            (declare (ignore _ __ ___))
            (funcall fn (make-reuters-text
                         :name name
                         :clean text
                         :tokens tokens
                         :headline headline
                         :byline byline
                         :dateline dateline))))))))

It relies on read-corpus-file which processes individual XML documents just like we saw early for the NPS Chat corpus. But the documents are fed into it not by fad:walk-directory, but with the help of the utilities, provided by David Lichteblau's excellent zip library.

(zip:with-zipfile (zip path)
  (zip:do-zipfile-entries (name entry zip)
    (unless (char= #\/ (last-char name))
      (with-zipped-zip (in entry :raw t)

In this snippet we open the zip file at path in with-zipfile and iterate over its entries with do-zipfile-entries. These are usual Lisp patterns to handle such kinds of resources. Yet inside the zip file we find another layer of zip archives. To remove unnecessary hassle and boilerplate I've added an additional macro with-zipped-zip. It has to some extent to replicate the functionality of with-zipfile, but it should take the data from the contents of one of the entries of the already open zip file. Another twist is that it optionally gives the possibility to access the raw unzipped binary stream, not yet converted to a text representation - this is useful for CXML which can work with such streams efficiently.

(defmacro with-zipped-zip ((name stream zipfile-entry
                                   &key (external-format :utf-8) raw)
                           &body body)
  (with-gensyms (zipstream v end entry entries zip x n)
    ;; here we transform the archives contents into an input stream
    ;; and then read it
    `(flex:with-input-from-sequence
          (,zipstream (zip:zipfile-entry-contents ,zipfile-entry))
        (let ((,v (make-array (zip:zipfile-entry-size ,zipfile-entry)
                              :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))))
          (read-sequence ,v ,zipstream)

          ;; here we look for the central directory header
          ;; and move to it in the stream
          (if-it (search #(80 75 5 6) ,v :from-end t)
                 (file-position ,zipstream it)
                 (error "end of central directory header not found"))

          ;; here we create a corresponding zipfile object for the entry
          (let* ((,end (zip::make-end-header ,zipstream))
                 (,n (zip::end/total-files ,end))
                 (,entries (make-hash-table :test #'equal))
                 (,zip (zip::make-zipfile
                        :stream ,zipstream
                        :entries ,entries
                        :external-format ,external-format)))
            (file-position ,zipstream
                           (zip::end/central-directory-offset ,end))

            ;; and here we read individual entries from the archive
            (dotimes (,x ,n)
              (let ((,entry (zip::read-entry-object ,zipstream
                                                    ,external-format)))
                (set# (zip:zipfile-entry-name ,entry) ,entries ,entry)))

            ;; finally, we're able to access entries in the same manner
            ;; as we'll do for the ordinary archive
            (do-entries (,name ,stream ,zip
                         :external-format ,external-format :raw ,raw)
              ,@body))))))

As you see, this macro uses a lot of zip's internal symbols, as it implements the similar function to the one which the library does, but not anticipated by its author...

Let's see how it works:

NLP> (map-corpus :reuters "Reuters.zip"
                 #`(print (text-name %)))
"Reuters/Eng Lang_Disk 1/19960824.zip/12536newsML.xml"
"Reuters/Eng Lang_Disk 1/19960824.zip/12537newsML.xml"
...

Processing the Penn Treebank

The Penn Treebank is a very important corpus which is also not easy to obtain: you have to order a CD from Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) and pay more than 1.5 thousand dollars for it. Yet, there are 2 workarounds:

  • NLTK data provides 5% of the treebank, so you can use it for experimenting with the data format
  • There's a more recent corpus OntoNotes which includes the Penn Treebank, and you also should obtain it from LDC, but it costs only 50$ (I've learned about its existence on StackOverflow, ordered it and it indeed has a treebank inside, as well as a lot of other useful linguistic annotations; the only thing I'm not sure about is whether it is an exact copy of the Penn Treebank)

Let's see how to load the NLTK's treebank. The obvious thing about treebanks is that they are basically Lisp code, so it should be very easy to parse the data with Lisp. The only catch is that the treebank doesn't obey Lisp's formatting rules for strings and doesn't distinguish special characters like quote and pipe. So the task is to properly handle all that.

In CL-NLP we have several utilities for dealing with trees: the macros dotree and doleaves which execute arbitrary code for each subtree or leaf in a tree for side-effects, and their counterpart functions maptree and mapleaves that allow to create isomorphic tree structures by applying a function to all tree's nodes or leaf nodes.

So, reading a treebanked tree will be performed in 2 steps:

  • first, we prepare the tree for loading by properly escaping everything:

    (defun prepare-tree-for-reading (string)
      (strjoin " " (mapcar #`(cond-it
                               ((char= #\( (char % 0))
                                (cond-it
                                  ((member (sub % 1)
                                           '("." "," ";" ":" "#" "''" "``")
                                           :test 'string=)
                                   (fmt "(|~A|" (sub % 1))))
                                  ((position #\| %)
                                   (fmt "(|~A\\|~A|"
                                        (sub % 1 it) (sub % (1+ it))))
                                  (t %)))
                               ((position #\) %)
                                (if (zerop it)
                                    %
                                    (fmt "\"~A\"~A" (sub % 0 it) (sub % it))))
                               (t (fmt "\"~A\"" %)))
                           (split-sequence-if #`(member % +white-chars+)
                                              string :remove-empty-subseqs t)))
    
  • and then we read the tree with the Lisp reader and separately collect its tokens:

    (defmethod read-corpus-file ((type (eql :treebank)) file)
      (let ((raw (string-trim +white-chars+ (read-file file))))
        (with-input-from-string (in (prepare-tree-for-reading raw))
          (loop
             :for tree := (car (read in nil)) :while tree
             :collect raw :into raws
             :collect tree :into trees
             :collect (let ((pos 0)
                            toks)
                        (dotree (subtree tree)
                          (when (and (listp subtree)
                                     (single (cdr subtree))
                                     (atom (cadr subtree)))
                            (let ((word (second subtree)))
                              (push (make-token
                                     :beg pos
                                     :end (1- (incf pos (1+ (length word))))
                                     :word word
                                     :tag (first subtree))
                                    toks))))
                        (reverse toks))
             :into tokens
             :finally
             (return (values (strjoin #\Newline raws)
                             (mapcar #`(strjoin #\Space
                                                (mapcar #'token-word %))
                                     tokens)
                             tokens
                             trees))))))
    

Other corpora

Most of the other corpora will use formats similar to the Brown, Reuters Corpus, or Penn Treebank, so their readers may easily be defined by analogy. Besides, the implementations of read-corpus methods assume a certain way to present the corpus to the library: in a filesystem directory, in a zipfile etc. Certainly, the corpora may come in different form, but it will take just a couple of lines of code changed to re-purpose the methods to handle a different representation

Working with some other collections of documents presented in the NLTK book, like Project Gutenberd collection of famous literary texts in public domain or Inaugural speeches collection is just trivial - you can see how it's done in our implementation of Chapter 1.

For instance, if we have Project Gutenberg collection in some directory dir, we can process it by using the following pattern:

(fad:walk-directory
 dir
 #`(let ((text (string-trim +white-chars (read-file %))))
     ... do some processing on the raw text of the corpus ...
     ))

Working with Wikipedia and Wiktionary

Unlike most of academic corpora that are not so easy to obtain Wikipedia and Wiktionary without a hassle give you access to full dumps of their data in various formats: SQL, XML and text. For instance, we can obtain the latest dump of English Wiktionary from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/.

I found it the most convenient to process them using the same XML SAX parsing approach that was utilized for the Reuters and NPS Chat corpora. The difference for them is that inside the XML documents a special Mediawiki markup is used to add metadata. It is, in fact, a heroic feat to parse this markup, because it doesn't have a clear, precise spec - it's real spec is the PHP code of the Wikipedia's parser,- and different people tend to (ab)use different variations of annotations to express the same or similar things, as well as just to use the markup in an untidy manner. I call such documents semi-structured compared to unstructured raw text and structured XML markup. Still, there's a lot of value in this annotation, because of their crowdsourced nature that allows to capture much more information than in most centralized efforts. Basically, there are 2 ways to work with Mediawiki markup: using regexes or implementing the complete parser.

Below is a snippet of code, that uses the regex-based approach to extract some information from the English Wiktionary - English word definitions. In Wiktionary markup the definitions are inside each language's section (denoted with ==Lang== marker, where Lang can be English or some other language). The definitions themselves are placed on their own lines and start with one of these markers: #, #:, #*, #*:, #*::, * [[.

(defvar *defs* (list))

(defclass word-collector (sax:sax-parser-mixin)
  ((title :accessor title :initform nil)
   (tag :accessor tag :initform nil)
   (text :accessor text :initform ())
   (itemcount :accessor itemcount :initform 0)
   (tagcount :accessor tagcount :initform 0)))

(defmethod sax:end-element ((sax word-collector)
                            namespace-uri local-name qname)
  (with-slots (title tag text) sax
    (when (string= "text" local-name)
      (let ((lang-marker "==English==")
            (whole-text (strjoin "" (reverse text))))
        (when-it (search lang-marker whole-text)
          (let ((start (+ it (length lang-marker))))
            (dolist (line (split-sequence
                           #\Newline (sub whole-text start
                                          (re:scan "[^=]==[^=]" whole-text
                                                   :start start))))
              (when (some #`(starts-with % line)
                          '("# " "#: " "#* " "#*: " "#*:: " "* [["))
                (push (clean-words line) *defs*)
                (incf (itemcount sax))))))))))))

(defun clean-words (line)
  "Return a list of downcased words (only alpha-chars or hyphens
   in the middle) found in LINE."
  (mapcar #`(string-downcase (string-trim "-" %))
          (remove-if #`(or (blankp %)
                           (loop :for char :across % :do
                             (unless (or (alpha-char-p char)
                                         (char= #\- char))
                               (return t))))
                     (re:split +punctuation+ (raw-text line)))))

(defun raw-text (line)
  "Return LINE without special-purpose Wiktionary chars."
  (re:regex-replace-all "({[^}]+})|(\\[\\[)|(\\]\\])|('''?)"
                        (sub line (1+ (position #\Space line)))
                        ""))

As the task is clearly defined and limited - extract just the text of definitions - it is possible to use regexes here:

  • one regex to spot the interesting lines
  • another one to filter out all the unnecessary markup.

Using corpora

Now, as we can already load and play with our corpora let's take a look at some NLTK examples.

First, let's examine the Brown corpus. Here are its categories:

NLP> (ht-keys (corpus-groups *brown*))
(:PRESS-REPORTAGE :PRESS-EDITORIAL :PRESS-REVIEWS :RELIGION
 :SKILL-AND-HOBBIES :POPULAR-LORE :BELLES-LETTRES
 :MISCELLANEOUS-GOVERNMENT-HOUSE-ORGANS :LEARNED :FICTION-GENERAL
 :FICTION-MYSTERY :FICTION-SCIENCE :FICTION-ADVENTURE :FICTION-ROMANCE
 :HUMOR)

As you see, there is no "news" category which is mentioned in the NLTK example. Probably, what they refer to is :press-reportage.

NLP> (take 9 (mapcar #'token-word
                     (flatten (mapcar #'text-tokens
                                      (get# :press-reportage
                                            (corpus-groups *brown*))))))
("The" "Fulton" "County" "Grand" "Jury" "said" "Friday" "an" "investigation")

NLP> (take 9 (mapcar #'token-word
                     (flatten
                      (mapcar #'text-tokens
                              (remove-if-not #`(string= "cg22" (text-name %))
                                             (corpus-texts *brown*))))))
("Does" "our" "society" "have" "a" "runaway" "," "uncontrollable" "growth")

NLP> (setf *print-length* 3)
NLP> (mapcan #`(ncorpus::sentences-from-tokens (text-tokens %))
             (get# :press-reportage (corpus-groups *brown*)))
((#<The/at 0..3> #<Fulton/np-tl 4..10> #<County/nn-tl 11..17> ...)
 (#<The/at 166..169> #<jury/nn 170..174> #<further/rbr 175..182> ...)
 (#<The/at 409..412> #<September-October/np 413..430> #<term/nn 431..435> ...)
 ...)

The function sentences-from-tokens here operates under the assumption, that every token with . tag is ending a sentence, and it splits the sentences on one or more such tokens.

The presented code may seam much more elaborate, than the NLTK version:

>>> brown.words(categories='news')
['The', 'Fulton', 'County', 'Grand', 'Jury', 'said', ...]
>>> brown.words(fileids=['cg22'])
['Does', 'our', 'society', 'have', 'a', 'runaway', ',', ...]
>>> brown.sents(categories=['news', 'editorial', 'reviews'])
[['The', 'Fulton', 'County'...], ['The', 'jury', 'further'...], ...]

Yet, it should be understood, that it is easy to add a ton of various utility accessors, like it is done in NLTK, but they will inevitable make the code more complex and harder to maintain. And the question is, how frequently are they going to be used and what we will miss anyway? Coding such utilities is very pleasant and easy using the functional style, as shown above, so they are left outside of the scope of cl-nlp, at least until proven essential...

(NB. Don't forget to set *print-length* back to nil).

Next, we'll be once again looking at frequency distributions. First, we need to build an ngram index from Brown corpus words in "news" category. In chapter 1 we've already done a very similar thing:

NLP> (index-ngrams
      1 (mapcar #'token-word
                (flatten (mapcar #'text-tokens
                                 (get# :press-reportage
                                       (corpus-groups *brown*))))))
#<TABLE-NGRAMS order:1 count:14395 outcomes:108130 {101C2B57E3}>
NLP> (defvar *news-1grams* *)  ;; * is the previous returned value
NLP> (dolist (m '("can" "could" "may" "might" "must" "will"))
       (format t "~A: ~A " m (freq *news-1grams* m)))
can: 93 could: 86 may: 66 might: 38 must: 50 will: 389

Funny, some numbers don't add up to what there's in NLTK:

can: 94 could: 87 may: 93 might: 38 must: 53 will: 389

Well, we can double-check them from a different direction:

NLP> (length (remove-if-not
              #`(string= "can" %)
              (mapcar #'token-word
                      (flatten (mapcar #'text-tokens
                                       (get# :press-reportage
                                             (corpus-groups *brown*)))))))
93

Looks like our calculation is precise.

Next is conditional frequency distribution, but we'll leave this topic for the next part that is fully dedicated to that.

So far so good. We have examined common approaches to handling various corpora. There are, basically, 2 main things you need to do with them: load & parse and filter for some interesting information. The loading for most corpora will be performed either with some regexes on raw strings, with XML SAX parsing, or using the Lisp reader. And for filtering Lisp offers a great versatile toolset of higher-order functions: mapcar, remove-if-not, position, and reduce - to name a few.