How to write an English POS tagger with CL-NLP

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 text structure for representing an individual text of the corpus (most of the corpora are, thankfully, divided into separate files)
• a generic function read-corpus-file that should read a raw file and return as multiple values its several representations. The common representations supported by almost all its methods are: raw or almost raw text, clean text - just sentences stripped of all annotations, and tokens - a list of token lists extracted from each sentence. Additionally, other corpus-specific slots may be present. For example, a treebank-text structure adds a trees slot to hold the syntax trees extracted from the treebank
• a generic function read-corpus creates a corpus structure 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-corpus reads and streams each corpus file as a text structure 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, and dotable hash-table iteration
• a pair data type with lt/rt accessors and conversion routines to/from hash-tables
• ? generic element access operator with support for generic setf, plus := abbreviation for setf (that is using a common assignment symbol) and :+ analogy for incf

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 train method is specific to the greedy-ap-tagger. The generic perceptron training is much simpler, because it doesn't operate in a sequence labeling scenario (see the source code here)

• however, there's also an :after method defined for train on the avg-perceptron model which averages all the weights in the end and prunes the model by removing zero weights

• there are also 2 more methods that are not specialized for greedy-ap-tagger: train1 and update1. 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!

Announcing RADICAL-UTILS (a.k.a RUTILS 3.0)

TL;DR

RUTILS is to my knowledge the most comprehensive and all-encompassing suite of syntactic utilities to support modern day-to-day Common Lisp development. It aims to simplify the experience of both serious system-level development and rapid experimentation in the REPL.
The library has stabilized over more than 3 years of evolution, it introduces some substantial improvements not available elsewhere, has a thorough documentation and a good test suite. The only thing it lacks is, probably, a manual, yet example usage can be found in my other libraries (notably, CL-REDIS and SHOULD-TEST).

A short history

According to git history I've started the project RUTILS (originally, REASONABLE-UTILITIES) on Saturday, Sep 12 2009, almost 4,5 years ago. Yet, I've never done any serious announcement of it. One of the reasons was that it's kind of controversial to release "yet another"™ utilities library for Common Lisp, so I wanted to see if it would stick without any promotion. And it hasn't - i.e. it hasn't gotten any serious adoption in the CL crowd (e.g. only one of the authors of libraries in Quicklisp has used it, and only once there was a serious external interest to contribute). Yet, it did stick very well with me and has grown quite well over the years.
And now it has reached version 3 by finally getting a proper test suite, and I've also come to the conclusion that it makes sense to rename the project to RADICAL-UTILITIES - just to add a bit of self-irony that should be an essential component of any grown-up open source project. ;)

So, why RUTILS?

Initially, the concept of the library was expressed in its manifesto. Here are the three main points:

• Become an extension to Common Lisp standard by adding the missing pieces that were proposed by notable members of the community in the past or have been proven useful in other languages. This aim included support of as many CDRs, as possible.
• Accumulate all the useful syntactic utilities in one suite. Contrary to ALEXANDRIA), the most widely-used Lisp utilities library, that proclaims the concept of a "good citizen" (i.e. it doesn't include such libraries as SPLIT-SEQUENCE, ANAPHORA, or ITERATE), RUTILS aims to include all the needed pieces, regardless of their origin and presence in other libraries.
• Introduce fine-grained modularity - one of the common complaints about the standard is the lack of this property. So, as RUTILS is intended as an extension of the standard, it makes sense to address the complaint This point, actually, arouse interest from the folks at Mathematical Systems Institute, who proposed to co-develop the library, and that prompted the appearance of version 2.0. Yet, their plans had changed, and this collaboration hadn't worked out. However, it pushed me to the understanding of what should be done to make the library production-ready and generally useful.

REASONABLE-UTILITIES has failed in several aspects. First of all, there was not enough effort put into documentation and testing. Also, CDR support didn't prove very useful in practice. Finally, the modularity aspect, regardless of its theoretical appeal, doesn't seem to make a difference as well: :shadow is just enough to deal with modularity at this level :)
However, all that was not critical, because the benefits for me personally were always substantial.

Version 3.0. Radical?

So, RUTILS has gradually solidified. In 2011, I had found the time to document everything, and last year I had finally added a good test suite (after, also finally finding a comfortable way to write tests with SHOULD-TEST).
So, here are the main benefits of RUTILS:

• Adding a big set of list, hash-table, string, sequence, tree, array and other general-purpose utilities.
• Providing a readtable with support for short lambdas (similar to Clojure's), literal hash-tables and vectors, and heredoc strings. This is the first "radical" step, as it radically cracks on boilerplate, and is a good use of the standard reader facilities (as well, as the excellent NAMED-READTABLES library). In general, I would say that support making hash-tables a first-class citizen is the main achievement of RUTILS.
• And the second "radical" step - adding shortcuts for many standard Common Lisp operators and some of RUTILS utilities, as well. This serves three purposes: simplifies introduction of many operations to beginners, reduces typing in the REPL, and saves on horizontal line space (I adhere to 80-characters rule). This is a debatable decision, yet the stance of RUTILS is to provide the choice, but not enforce it.
• Adding a pair structure instead of cons-pair. Frankly, there's nothing very wrong with cons-pair, except for the ugly middle-dot syntax for it, but it's, I believe, a general agreement in the CL community, that cons-pair is legacy and should be deprecated. Getting rid of it also allows to retire car and cdr - which is a necessary step despite a strong affection to them with many seasoned lispers (myself included, although I'm not very seasoned :)

Some more radicality may be found in the system RUTILSX, which is treated as contrib. Here I plan to place the stuff which value may not really be well-proven. Currently, it includes iterate with keywords from keyword package (this solves naming conflicts and allows to use arbitrary clause keywords), my own version of a generic bind (I had a couple of attempts at it), and, perhaps, the most radical of all - the addition of ~ operator for generic access to elements of arbitrary structures. Think:

(~ #{:foo '(1 2 3}} :foo 1) => 2  ;; #{} is a literal hash-table syntax

Finally, as mentioned earlier, RUTILS also includes a comprehensive test suite that covers all, but the most basic and straightforward functions and macros. Most other utility libraries don't.

FAQ (imaginary)

ALEXANDRIA is the most widely used CL utilities library, and, actually, CL library in general. Why not use it?

I don't have anything against it, as it's just useful. Yet, if I was using it, I'd still need to depend on several other libraries (which is not a problem now with [quicklisp]). Still, I'd also have to include my own stuff in each project, as no external library provides reader macros for hash-tables and lambdas, as well as many other small things provided by RUTILS.

What about quickutil?

I think, it solves the wrong problem. The main problem is utilities' raw utility :) Lack of modularity is often mentioned as a drawback of the Lisp standard, but practice shows that it's just a perception issue, not a real-world one. I believe that the level of modularity provided by RUTILS is just good enough, and even it isn't utilized so far (but, maybe, in the future it will be to some extent). The QUICKUTIL approach just adds unnecessary bookkeeping and introduces another import mechanism, while sticking with the standard package import also would work and doesn't create additional mental tax and confusion.
Also, I've come to the conclusion that Lisp's flat namespaces are, actually, a win over most implementations of hierarchical namespaces, but that's a subject of another rant.

What about other individuals' utility suits (metatilities, arnesi, fare-utils, ...) - I remember, that Xach has counted around 13?

Most of them are not supported. They also are usually a random collection of stuff without a vision. Yet, sometimes it makes sense to use them as well: for instance, I've used ARNESI for its delimited continuations facility and had even put it a fork on my github to fix some bugs. Although, as discussed below, a finer-grained approach is better - see CL-CONT.

Have you heard of cl21? How does it compare with RUTILS?

Surely. It is a similar effort to RUTILS, but with a much bolder aim. I, personally, doubt that it will succeed in it, because Lisp's culture is quite conservative, and you need to get a buy-in from the community in order to make such radical moves. The problem with this is that no one has enough motivation, given that Lisp is already good enough, and there's no central authority to steward the evolution process.
So, the way to go, as for me, is to make small incremental improvements and get them adopted. This has always worked in the past, and there are many good examples: CLOSER-MOP, CL-PPCRE, NAMED-READTABLES, Marco Antoniotti's libraries, CL-CONT, OPTIMA, etc.
The main improvements, proposed by cl21 can or are already addressed by such libraries, including RUTILS. For instance, cl21 proposes the same literal syntax for hash-tables. Another utility already present in RUTILS is a generic sequence iteration loop: doeach in cl21 and doseq in RUTILSX.
The only thing that, IMHO, may make sense to explicitly modernize in Lisp is the reader, as it has 2 hard-coded cases for handling . and :. I'm thinking in the lines of providing access to the previously read item and thus allowing for definition of arbitrary infix syntaxes. But this needs much more research...

What about speed and performance?

Lisp is a dynamic language with good performance characteristics. One of the reasons for that is the standard library engineered with performance in mind. It is manifested in the presence of various specific functions for working with different data structures (like nth, svref, aref, char accessors). This prompts a valid criticism as being unfriendly to newcomers. The solution, in my opinion, is to build on top of that generic versions using capabilities provided by CLOS. The sequence-manipulation part of the standard sets such an example with the likes of elt. RUTILS continues along this track. But there's an obvious drawback of loosing the performance benefit. I think that the Lisp approach here is balanced, as it's always possible to fall back to the "low-level" specific functions (that should always be provided), and at the same time to use the easy approach in 95% of the case when performance isn't critical.

In RUTILS, there's very little support for functional programming. Why is it missing?

There are several aspects of functional programming that are not present in CL standard. One that is usually addressed by utilities is function composition and currying. It is also addressed by RUTILS but in an uncommon way - with sharp-backquote reader macro. In my opinion it's a more concise, yet easier to understand approach. Here are a couple of examples taken from cl21 docs and elsewhere:

 #`(member % '("foo" "bar") :test 'string=) is a generalized approach to currying
 #`(sin (1+ %)) is the equivalent of (compose #'sin #'1+) in cl21
 #`(and (integerp %) (evenp %)) is the equivalent of (conjoin #'integerp #'evenp) in cl21
 #`(or (oddp %) (zerop %)) is the equivalent of (disjoin #'oddp #'zerop) in cl21

The benefit of this approach is that it is the same for any kinds of composition, while you need to define your own functions to accommodate them with the "functional" style: for example, how do you join on xor? (btw, xor is also provided by RUTILS)
Other functional features, like lazy evaluation, pattern matching, or functional data-structures, are much more specific in use (for example, I use rarely use them if at all), and they have dedicated support elsewhere. See CLAZY, OPTIMA, and FSet for examples.

Where's the documentation you're mentioning?

It's in the docstrings and subsequently in the excellent quickdocs. With its appearance, I can only recommend everyone not to waste time on creating a function documentation for your library, and focus on manual and use cases instead. Though, we need to wait for the update of the project to the most recent quicklisp.