State-of-the-art
The problem of POS tagging is a sequence labeling task: assign each word in a sentence the correct part of speech. For English, it is considered to be more or less solved, i.e. there are taggers that have around 95% accuracy. It also has a rather high baseline: assigning each word its most probable tag will give you up to 90% accuracy to start with. Also, only around 10% of the words have more than 1 possible tag. However, their usage accounts for around 40% of total text volume.
Let's start our exercise by first verifying these facts in a data-driven manner. This will also allow us to examine the basic building blocks for our solution.
POS taggers are usually built as statistical models trained on some existing pre-labeled data. For English language there is quite a lot of it already available. For other languages, that don't possess such data, an unsupervised or a rule-based approach can be applied.
Data sources
The standard dataset that is used not only for training POS taggers, but, most importantly, for evaluation is the Penn Tree Bank Wall Street Journal dataset. It contains of not only POS tag, but also noun phrase and parse tree annotations.
Here's an example of the combined POS tag and noun phrase annotations from this corpus:
[ Pierre/NNP Vinken/NNP ]
,/,
[ 61/CD years/NNS ]
old/JJ ,/, will/MD join/VB
[ the/DT board/NN ]
as/IN
[ a/DT nonexecutive/JJ director/NN Nov./NNP 29/CD ]
./.
The tagset used in the annotation contains such symbols as
NNP for proper nouns, , for commas, and CD for cardinal numbers.
The whole set is provided for CL-NLP in the file src/syntax/word-tags.txt.
Here's a snippet from it:
X Unknown, uncertain, or unbracketable. X is often used for bracketing typos and in bracketing the...the-constructions.
CC Coordinating conjunction
...
It's, obviously, possible to extend it with other tags if necessary.
All of them are, finally, available as symbols of the tag package in CL-NLP.
Available data and tools to process it
What we're interested in, is obtaining a structured representation of this data.
The ncorp package implements interfaces to various raw representations,
such as this one.
Different NLP corpora exist in various formats:
- slightly annotated text, like the above
- XML-based formats (a well-known example is the Reuters corpus)
- a treebank format used for representing syntax trees
- and many others
Most of these representations are supported by the ncorp adapters at least to some extent.
The interface of this module consists of the following entities:
- a
textstructure for representing an individual text of the corpus (most of the corpora are, thankfully, divided into separate files) - a generic function
read-corpus-filethat should read a raw file and return as multiple values its several representations. The common representations supported by almost all its methods are:rawor almost raw text,cleantext - just sentences stripped of all annotations, andtokens- a list of token lists extracted from each sentence. Additionally, other corpus-specific slots may be present. For example, atreebank-textstructure adds atreesslot to hold the syntax trees extracted from the treebank - a generic function
read-corpuscreates acorpusstructure out of all corpus' texts. In practice, it's usually not feasible to do that due to large sizes of most of the useful corpora. That's why the next function is more practical - a generic function
map-corpusreads and streams each corpus file as atextstructure to the argument function. This is the default way to deal with corpus processing
For our task we'll be able to utilize just the tokens slot
of the ptb-tagged-text structure, produced with map-corpus.
Let's collect the tag distribution for each word from the WSJ section of the PTB:
NLP> (let ((words-dist #h(equal))
(map-corpus :ptb-tagged (corpus-file "ptb/TAGGED/POS/WSJ")
#`(dolist (sent (text-tokens %))
(dolist (tok sent)
(unless (in# (token-word tok) words-dist)
(:= (get# (token-word tok) words-dist) #h()))
(:+ (get# (token-tag tok)
(get# (token-word tok) words-dist)
0))))
:ext "POS")
words-dist)
#<HASH-TABLE :TEST EQUAL :COUNT 51457 {10467E6543}>
NLP> (reduce #'+ (mapcan #'ht-vals (ht-vals *)))
1289201
So, we have around 50k distinct words and 1,3m tokens.
But, actually, the resources in the field has made some progress in the last decades, and there's a bigger corpus now available that contains not only the whole Penn Tree Bank, but also some more data from other domains. The annotations of the WSJ section in it were also improved. It is called OntoNotes. Let's do the same with its data:
NLP> (let ((words-dist #h(equal)))
(map-corpus :treebank (corpus-file "ontonotes/")
#`(dolist (sent (text-tokens %))
(dolist (tok sent)
(with-accessors ((tag token-tag) (word token-word)) tok
(unless (eql tag 'tag:-NONE-)
(unless (in# word words-dist)
(:= (get# word words-dist) #h()))
(:+ (get# tag (get# word words-dist) 0))))))
:ext "parse")
words-dist)
#<HASH-TABLE :TEST EQUAL :COUNT 60925 {1039EAE243}>
So, in the OntoNotes 4.0 there are 60925 distinct words. 50925 of them (~84%) are tagged with a single tag. I.e. we have a 16% of multi-tag words which corresponds well with the theoretical data. Also, there are 2,1m tokens in the corpus in total.
Calculating the number of words with distinct tags:
(count-if-not #`(= 1 (ht-count (rt %)))
(ht->pairs words-dist))
And what about the total volume?
NLP> (let ((total1 0)
(total 0))
(map-corpus :treebank "ontonotes"
#`(dolist (sent (text-tokens %))
(dolist (tok sent)
(unless (eql (token-tag tok) 'tag:-NONE-)
(:+ total)
(when (in# (token-word tok) *single-tag-words*)
(:+ total1)))))
:ext "parse")
(float (/ total1 total)))
0.2409884
Only 24% instead of 60%! What's wrong?
OK, here's the trick: let's add words that have more than 1 tag,
but >99% of their occurrences are labeled with a single tag.
For instance, the word "the" has 9 distinct tags in OntoNotes,
but 0.9997 of the times it's a DT.
If we consider such words to have a single tag, we'll get just a slight increase in the number of single-tag words (+386: 51302 instead of 50916), but a dramatic increase in the volume of their occurrence - now it's 63%! Just as the literature tells us.
(NB. Taking such shortcut will only increase the quality of the POS tagger as 99% is above the accuracy it will be able to achieve anyhow, which is at most 97% on the same-domain data and even lower for out-of-domain data.)
Here's how we can determine such set of words:
(remove-if-not #`(let ((tag-dist (ht-vals (rt %))))
(> (/ (reduce #'max tag-dist)
(reduce #'+ tag-dist))
0.99))
(ht->pairs tag-dist))
NB. The above code samples contain some non-standard utilities and idioms
that may look somewhat alien to some Lisp programmers.
All of them are from my RUTILS library,
and you'll see more below. Mostly, these include some hash-table-specific operators,
new iteration constructs, a few radical abbreviations for common operations,
and literal syntax for hash-tables (#h()) and anonymous functions (#`()).
Some of them are:
get#/in#/set#specialized hash-table access routines, anddotablehash-table iteration- a pair data type with
lt/rtaccessors and conversion routines to/from hash-tables ?generic element access operator with support for genericsetf, plus:=abbreviation forsetf(that is using a common assignment symbol) and:+analogy forincf
Building the POS tagger
We have explored how to access different corpus data that we'll need to train the POS tagger. To actually do that, we'll re-implement the approach described by Matthew Honnibal in "A good POS tagger in about 200 lines of Python". In fact, due to the expressiveness of Lisp and efficiency of SBCL, we'll need even less than 200 lines, and we'll get the performance comparable to a much more complex Cyton implementation of the parser (6s against 4s on 130k tokens), but that's details... ;)
Here's the source code we'll be discussing below on github.
Our tagger will use a greedy averaged perceptron model with single-tag words dictionary lookup:
(defclass greedy-ap-tagger (avg-perceptron tagger)
((dict :initform #h(equal) :initarg :dict :accessor tgr-dict)
(single-tag-words :initform #h(equalp) :initarg :single-tag-words
:accessor tgr-single-tag-words))
(:documentation
"A greedy averaged perceptron tagger with single-tag words dictionary lookup."))
As you see, it is derived from a generic class tagger and an avg-perceptron learning model.
It also has a dict slot that holds all the words known to the tagger.
Every tagger has just one generic function associated with it.
You guessed its name - tag :)
(defmethod tag ((tagger greedy-ap-tagger) (sentence sentence))
(let ((prev :-START-)
(prev2 :-START2-)
(ctx (sent-ctx sentence)))
(doindex (i token (sent-tokens sentence))
(:= (token-tag token)
(classify tagger
(extract-fs tagger i (token-word token) ctx prev prev2))
prev2 prev
prev (token-tag token)))
sentence))
It accepts an already tokenized sentence and (destructively) assigns tags
to each of its tokens.
The main job is performed by the call to classify method that is defined for every
statistical learning model in CL-NLP. Another model-associated method here is extract-fs
which produces a list of features that describe the current sample.
Now, let's take a look at the implementation of these learning model-related methods.
(defmethod classify ((model greedy-ap-tagger) fs)
(or (get# (first fs) (tgr-single-tag-words model))
(call-next-method model (rest fs))))
For the tagger, we first check the current word against the dictionary of
single-tag-words that we've built in the previous part
and then call the classify method of the avg-perceptron model itself.
That one is a matter of simply returning a class that is an argmax
of a dot product between model weights and sample features fs
that in this case can only have values of 1 or 0.
(defmethod classify ((model greedy-ap) fs)
(let ((scores #h()))
(dotable (class weights (m-weights model))
(dolist (f fs)
(:+ (get# class scores 0) (get# f weights 0))))
(keymax scores))) ; keymax is argmax for hash-tables
As you see, averaged perceptron is very straightforward - a simple linear model
that has a weights slot which is a mapping of feature weights for every class.
In the future this method will probably be assigned to a linear-model class,
but it hasn't been added to CL-NLP so far.
Training
Let's take a look at the training part. It consists of 2 steps.
extract-fs performs feature extraction.
What it, basically, does in our case of a simple perceptron model
is returning a list of features preceded by the word we're currently tagging.
(cons word (make-fs model
"bias"
("i pref1" (char word 0))
("i word" word)
("i-1 tag" prev-tag)
...
The make-fs macro is responsible for interning the features as symbols
in package f by concatenating the provided prefixes and calculated variables.
This is a standard Lisp practice to use symbols instead of raw strings for such things.
So, in the above example for the word "the" preceded by a word tagged as VBZ
will get the following list of features:
'("the" f:|bias| f:|i pref1 t| f:|word the| f:|i-1 tag VBZ| ...)
The second part of learning is training. It is the most involved procedure here,
yet still very simple conceptually. Just like with the tag method,
we're iterating over all tokens preceded by a dummy :-START2- and :-START- ones,
and guessing the current tag using classify.
Afterwards we're updating the model's weights in train1.
The only difference is that we need to explicitly first consider the case
of single-tag-words not to run the model update step for it.
This is how it all looks modulo debugging instrumentation.
Note the use of psetf to update prev and prev2 simultaneously.
(defmethod train ((model greedy-ap-tagger) sents &key (epochs 5))
(with-slots (single-tag-words dict) model
;; expand dict
(dolist (sent sents)
(dolist (tok (sent-tokens sent))
(set# (token-word tok) dict nil)))
;; expand single-tag-words
(dotable (word tag (build-single-tag-words-dict (mapcar #'sent-tokens sents)
:ignore-case? t))
(unless (in# word single-tag-words)
(set# word single-tag-words tag)))
;; train
(dotimes (epoch epochs)
(dolist (sent (mapcar #'sent-tokens sents))
(let* ((prev :-START-)
(prev2 :-START2-)
(ctx (sent-ctx sent)))
(doindex (i token sent)
(let ((word (token-word token)))
(psetf prev
(or (get# word single-tag-words)
(let* ((fs (extract-fs model i word ctx prev prev2))
(guess (classify model fs)))
(train1 model (rest fs) (token-tag token) guess)
guess))
prev2 prev)))))
(:= sents (shuffle sents))))
model)
Note the additional expansion of the single-tag-words dict of the model
(as well as of the normal dict).
An interesting feature of the problem's object-oriented decomposition in this case is that we have a generic perceptron machinery we'd like to capture and reuse for different concrete models, and a model-specific implementation details.
This dichotomy is manifested in the training phase:
the
trainmethod is specific to thegreedy-ap-tagger. The genericperceptrontraining is much simpler, because it doesn't operate in a sequence labeling scenario (see the source code here)however, there's also an
:aftermethod defined fortrainon theavg-perceptronmodel which averages all the weights in the end and prunes the model by removing zero weightsthere are also 2 more methods that are not specialized for
greedy-ap-tagger:train1andupdate1. They perform 1 step of the normal perceptron training and model update(defmethod train1 ((model perceptron) fs gold guess) (:+ (ap-step model)) (dolist (f fs) (ensure-f-init model f gold guess) (loop :for class :in (list gold guess) :for val :in '(1 -1) :do (update1 model f class val)))) (defmethod update1 ((model avg-perceptron) f class val) (with-slots (step timestamps weights totals) model (:+ (? totals class f) (* (- step (? timestamps class f)) (? weights class f))) (:+ (? weights class f) val) (:= (? timestamps class f) step)))
Evaluation & persisting the model
We have reached the last part of every machine learning exercise - evaluation. Usually it's about measuring precision/recall/f-measure, but in the tagger case both precision and recall are the same, because the sets of relevant and retrieved items are the same, so we can calculate just the accuracy:
NLP> (accuracy *tagger* *gold-test*)
....................................................................................................
96.39183
A "gold" corpus is used for evaluation. This one was performed
on the standard evaluation set which is the Wall Street Journal corpus (parts 22-24),
OntoNotes 4.0 version. The model was also trained on the standard training set (0-18).
Its results are consistent with the performance of the reference model from the blog post.
The "gold" features where obtained by calling the extract-gold method
of our model on the data from the treebank.
But wait, we can do more.
First, on the evaluation part. It's not being a secret already for a long time in the NLP community that WSJ corpus is far from representative to the real-world use cases. And I'm not even talking of twitter here, but just various genres of writing have different vocabularies and distributions of sentence structures. So, the high baselines shown by many results on the WSJ corpus may not be that robust. To help with such kind of evaluation Google and Yahoo have recently released another treebank called WebText that collect 5 different types of texts seen on the web: from dialogues to blog posts. It's smaller than Penn Treebank: 273k tokens isntead of 1,3m with 23k distinct word types. If we evaluate on it the accuracy drops substantially: only 89.74406!
What we can do is train on more data with better variability. Let's retrain our model on the whole OntoNotes (minus the evaluation set of WSJ 22-24). Here are the results:
- on WSJ evaluation set: 96.76323 - a modest gain of 0.4%: we're already at max here
- on Webtext: 92.9431 - a huge gain of more than 4%!
So, broader data helps. What else can we do?
Another aspect we haven't touched is normalization. There are some variants of generating arbitrary tokens in English which lend themselves well to normalization to some root form. These include numbers, emails, urls, and hyphenated words. The normalization variant proposed by Honnibal is rather primitive and can be improved.
Here's an original variant:
(defmethod normalize ((model greedy-ap-tagger) (word string))
(cond
((and (find #\- word) (not (char= #\- (char word 0))))
"!HYPHEN")
((every #'digit-char-p word)
(if (= 4 (length word)) "!YEAR" "!DIGITS"))
(t (string-downcase word))))
And here's a modified one:
(defmethod normalize ((model greedy-ap-tagger) (word string))
(cond-it
((re:scan *number-regex* word) (make-string (length word) :initial-element #\0))
((re:scan *email-regex* word) "!EMAIL")
((re:scan *url-regex* word) "!URL")
((in# word (tgr-dict model)) (string-downcase word))
((position #\- word :start 1 :from-end t)
(let ((suffix (slice word (1+ it))))
(if (in# suffix (tgr-dict model))
(string-downcase suffix)
"!HYPH")))
(t (string-downcase word))))
Such change allows to gain another 0.06% accuracy on the Webtext corpus. So, normalization improvement doesn't help that much. However, I think it should be more useful in real-world scenarios.
Now, as we finally have the best model we need a way to persist and restore it.
The corresponding save-model/load-model methods exist for any categorical model.
They use the handy ZIP and
USERIAL
libraries to save models into a single zip file,
serializing textual (categories and feature names) and binary data (floating point weights)
into separate files. Here's how our serialized POS tagger model looks like:
Length File
-------- --------------------
552 classes.txt
4032099 fs.txt
2916012 fs.bin
2916012 weights.bin
35308 single-tag-words.txt
484712 dict.txt
-------- --------------------
10384695 6 files
Finally, I believe, it's an essential practice to make all results we post online reproducible,
but, unfortunately, there are restrictions on the use of the Pen Treebank corpus data,
so we can't just add an automated test that will reproduce the contents of this post.
Still, a small portion of OntoNotes WSJ corpus can be used under the fair use policy,
and it is provided with CL-NLP for evaluation purposes.
Let's add such a test to give the users confidence in the performance of our model.
For testing CL-NLP I'm using yet another my own library
which is called SHOULD-TEST -
I'll have another blog devoted to it some time in the future.
Here's a test we need:
(defun extract-sents (text)
(mapcar #`(make 'ncore:sentence :tokens (ncorp:remove-dummy-tokens %))
(ncore:text-tokens text)))
(defvar *tagger* (load-model (make 'greedy-ap-tagger)
(models-file "pos-tagging/onf.zip")
:classes-package :tag))
(defvar *gold*
(let (test)
(ncorp:map-corpus :treebank (corpus-file "onf-wsj/")
#`(appendf test (extract-sents %)))
(extract-gold *tagger* test)))
(deftest greedy-ap-tagger-quality ()
(should be = 96.31641
(accuracy *tagger* *gold*)))
Summing up
In this article I've tried to describe the whole process of creating
a new statistics-based model using CL-NLP.
As long as you have the necessary data, it is quite straightforward and commonplace.
If you want to use one of the existing models (namely, greedy averaged perceptron, as of now) you can reuse almost all of the machinery and just add a couple of functions to reflect the specifics of your task. I think, it's a great demonstration of the power of the generic programming capabilities of CLOS.
Obviously, feature engineering is on you,
but training/evaluation/saving/restoring the model can be handled transparently
by CL-NLP tools. There's also support for common data processing and calculation tasks.
We have looked at some of the popular corpora in this domain (all of which, unfortunately, have some usage restrictions and are not readily available, but can be obtained for research purposes). And we've observed some of factors that impact the performance and robustness of machine learning models. I'd say that our final model is of the production-ready state-of-the-art level, so you can safely use it for your real-world tasks (under the licensing restrictions of the OntoNotes dataset used for training it). Surely, if you have your own data, it should be straightforward to re-train the model with it.
You can also add your own learning algorithms, and I'm going to be continue doing the same likewise.
Stay tuned and have fun!
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