Basic Text

Processing

Regular Expressions
Regular expressions

• A formal language for specifying text strings

• How can we search for any of these?
– woodchuck
– woodchucks
– Woodchuck
– Woodchucks
 Regular Expressions: Disjunctions

• Letters inside square brackets []

Pattern Matches
[wW]oodchuck Woodchuck, woodchuck
[1234567890] Any digit

• Ranges [A-Z]
Pattern Matches
[A-Z] An upper case Drenched Blossoms
letter
[a-z] A lower case letter my beans were impatient
[0-9] A single digit Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit Hole
 Regular Expressions: Negation in Disjunction

• Negations [^Ss]
– Carat means negation only when first in []

Pattern Matches

[^A-Z] Not an upper case letter Oyfn pripetchik

[^Ss] Neither ‘S’ nor ‘s’ I have no exquisite reason”

[^e^] Neither e nor ^ Look here

a^b The pattern a carat b Look up a^b now

 Regular Expressions: More Disjunction

• Woodchucks is another name for groundhog!

• The pipe | for disjunction
Pattern Matches

groundhog|woodchuck

yours|mine yours mine

a|b|c = [abc]

[gG]roundhog|[Ww]oodchuck

Photo D. Fletcher
 Regular Expressions: ? * + .

Pattern Matches

colou?r Optional previous color colour

char
oo*h! 0 or more of oh! ooh! oooh! ooooh!
previous char
o+h! 1 or more of oh! ooh! oooh! ooooh!
previous char
baa+ baa baaa baaaa baaaaa
Stephen C Kleene
beg.n begin begun begun beg3n

Kleene *, Kleene +
Regular Expressions: Anchors ^ $

Pattern Matches

^[A-Z] Palo Alto

^[^A-Za-z] 1 “Hello”

\.$ The end.

.$ The end? The end!

Example
• Find me all instances of the word “the” in a text.
the
Misses capitalized examples
[tT]he
Incorrectly returns other or theology
[^a-zA-Z][tT]he[^a-zA-Z]
Errors

• The process we just went through was based on

fixing two kinds of errors
– Matching strings that we should not have matched
(there, then, other)
• False positives (Type I)
– Not matching things that we should have matched
(The)
• False negatives (Type II)
Errors cont.

• In NLP we are always dealing with these kinds of

errors.
• Reducing the error rate for an application often
involves two antagonistic efforts:
– Increasing accuracy or precision (minimizing false
positives)
– Increasing coverage or recall (minimizing false
negatives).
Summary
• Regular expressions play a surprisingly large role
– Sophisticated sequences of regular expressions are often the
first model for any text processing text
• For many hard tasks, we use machine learning classifiers
– But regular expressions are used as features in the classifiers
– Can be very useful in capturing generalizations
 Basic Text
Processing

Regular Expressions
 Basic Text
Processing
Word tokenization
 Text Normalization

• Every NLP task needs to do text

normalization:
1. Segmenting/tokenizing words in running
text
2. Normalizing word formats
3. Segmenting sentences in running text
How many words?

• I do uh main- mainly business data processing

– Fragments, filled pauses
• Seuss’s cat in the hat is different from other cats!
– Lemma: same stem, part of speech, rough word sense
• cat and cats = same lemma
– Wordform: the full inflected surface form
• cat and cats = different wordforms
How many words?

they lay back on the San Francisco grass and looked at the stars
and their

• Type: an element of the vocabulary.

• Token: an instance of that type in running text.
• How many?
– 15 tokens (or 14)
– 13 types (or 12) (or 11?)
How many words?

N = number of tokens
Church and Gale (1990): |V| > O(N½)
V = vocabulary = set of types
|V| is the size of the vocabulary

Tokens = N Types = |V|

Switchboard phone 2.4 million 20 thousand

conversations
Shakespeare 884,000 31 thousand

Google N-grams 1 trillion 13 million

 Simple Tokenization in UNIX

• (Inspired by Ken Church’s UNIX for Poets.)

• Given a text file, output the word tokens and their
frequencies Change all non-alpha to newlines
tr -sc ’A-Za-z’ ’\n’ < shakes.txt
Sort in alphabetical order
| sort Merge and count each type
| uniq –c
25 Aaron
1945 A 6 Abate
72 AARON 1 Abates
19 ABBESS 5 Abbess
6 Abbey
5 ABBOT
3 Abbot
... ... .... …
The first step: tokenizing
tr -sc ’A-Za-z’ ’\n’ < shakes.txt | head
THE
SONNETS
by
William
Shakespeare
From
fairest
creatures
We
...
The second step: sorting
tr -sc ’A-Za-z’ ’\n’ < shakes.txt | sort | head
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
A
...
 More counting
• Merging upper and lower case
tr ‘A-Z’ ‘a-z’ < shakes.txt | tr –sc ‘A-Za-z’ ‘\n’ | sort | uniq –c
• Sorting the counts
tr ‘A-Z’ ‘a-z’ < shakes.txt | tr –sc ‘A-Za-z’ ‘\n’ | sort | uniq –c | sort –n –r

23243 the
22225 i
18618 and
16339 to
15687 of
12780 a
12163 you
10839 my What happened here?
10005 in
8954 d
 Issues in Tokenization

• Finland’s capital  Finland Finlands Finland’s ?

• what’re, I’m, isn’t  What are, I am, is not
• Hewlett-Packard  Hewlett Packard ?
• state-of-the-art  state of the art ?
• Lowercase  lower-case lowercase lower case ?
• San Francisco  one token or two?
• m.p.h., PhD.  ??
 Tokenization: language issues

• French
– L'ensemble  one token or two?
• L ? L’ ? Le ?
• Want l’ensemble to match with un ensemble

• German noun compounds are not segmented

– Lebensversicherungsgesellschaftsangestellter
– ‘life insurance company employee’
– German information retrieval needs compound splitter
 Tokenization: language issues

• Chinese and Japanese no spaces between words:

– 莎拉波娃现在居住在美国东南部的佛罗里达。
– 莎拉波娃 现在 居住 在 美国 东南部 的 佛罗里达
– Sharapova now lives in US southeastern Florida
• Further complicated in Japanese, with multiple alphabets
intermingled
– Dates/amounts in multiple formats

フォーチュン 500 社は情報不足のため時間あた $500K( 約 6,000 万円 )

Katakana Hiragana Kanji Romaji

End-user can express query entirely in hiragana!
Word Tokenization in Chinese
• Also called Word Segmentation
• Chinese words are composed of characters
– Characters are generally 1 syllable and 1 morpheme.
– Average word is 2.4 characters long.
• Standard baseline segmentation algorithm:
– Maximum Matching (also called Greedy)
Maximum Matching
Word Segmentation Algorithm
• Given a wordlist of Chinese, and a string.
1) Start a pointer at the beginning of the string
2) Find the longest word in dictionary that matches the
string starting at pointer
3) Move the pointer over the word in string
4) Go to 2
 Max-match segmentation illustration

• Thecatinthehat the cat in the hat

• Thetabledownthere the table down there
theta bled own there
• Doesn’t generally work in English!

• But works astonishingly well in Chinese

– 莎拉波娃现在居住在美国东南部的佛罗里达。
– 莎拉波娃 现在 居住 在 美国 东南部 的 佛罗里达
• Modern probabilistic segmentation algorithms even better
 Basic Text
Processing
Word tokenization
 Basic Text
Processing

Word Normalization and

Stemming
 Normalization
• Need to “normalize” terms
– Information Retrieval: indexed text & query terms must have
same form.
• We want to match U.S.A. and USA
• We implicitly define equivalence classes of terms
– e.g., deleting periods in a term
• Alternative: asymmetric expansion:
– Enter: window Search: window, windows
– Enter: windows Search: Windows, windows, window
– Enter: Windows Search: Windows
• Potentially more powerful, but less efficient
Case folding

• Applications like IR: reduce all letters to lower

case
– Since users tend to use lower case
– Possible exception: upper case in mid-sentence?
• e.g., General Motors
• Fed vs. fed
• SAIL vs. sail
• For sentiment analysis, MT, Information
extraction
– Case is helpful (US versus us is important)
 Lemmatization

• Reduce inflections or variant forms to base form

– am, are, is  be
– car, cars, car's, cars'  car
• the boy's cars are different colors  the boy car be different
color
• Lemmatization: have to find correct dictionary headword
form
• Machine translation
– Spanish quiero (‘I want’), quieres (‘you want’) same lemma as
Morphology

• Morphemes:
– The small meaningful units that make up words
– Stems: The core meaning-bearing units
– Affixes: Bits and pieces that adhere to stems
• Often with grammatical functions
Stemming
• Reduce terms to their stems in information retrieval
• Stemming is crude chopping of affixes
– language dependent
– e.g., automate(s), automatic, automation all reduced to
automat.

for example compressed for exampl compress and

and compression are both compress ar both accept
accepted as equivalent to as equival to compress
compress.
 Porter’s algorithm
The most common English stemmer

Step 1a Step 2 (for long stems)

sses  ss caresses  caress ational ate relational relate
ies  i ponies  poni izer ize digitizer  digitize
ss  ss caress  caress
ator ate operator  operate
s ø cats  cat
…
Step 1b
Step 3 (for longer stems)
(*v*)ing  ø walking  walk
al  ø revival  reviv
sing  sing
able  ø adjustable  adjust
(*v*)ed  ø plastered  plaster
ate  ø activate  activ
…
…
Viewing morphology in a corpus
Why only strip –ing if there is a vowel?

(*v*)ing  ø walking  walk

sing  sing
 Viewing morphology in a corpus
Why only strip –ing if there is a vowel?

(*v*)ing  ø walking  walk

sing  sing

tr -sc 'A-Za-z' '\n' < shakes.txt | grep ’ing$' | sort | uniq -c | sort –nr
1312 King 548 being
548 being 541 nothing
541 nothing 152 something
388 king 145 coming
375 bring 130 morning
358 thing 122 having
307 ring 120 living
152 something 117 loving
145 coming 116 Being
130 morning 102 going
tr -sc 'A-Za-z' '\n' < shakes.txt | grep '[aeiou].*ing$' | sort | uniq -c | sort –nr
Dealing with complex morphology is sometimes
necessary

• Some languages requires complex morpheme

segmentation
– Turkish
– Uygarlastiramadiklarimizdanmissinizcasina
– `(behaving) as if you are among those whom we could not civilize’
– Uygar `civilized’ + las `become’
+ tir `cause’ + ama `not able’
+ dik `past’ + lar ‘plural’
+ imiz ‘p1pl’ + dan ‘abl’
+ mis ‘past’ + siniz ‘2pl’ + casina ‘as if’
 Basic Text
Processing

Word Normalization and

Stemming
 Basic Text
Processing

Sentence Segmentation
and Decision Trees
 Sentence Segmentation

• !, ? are relatively unambiguous

• Period “.” is quite ambiguous
– Sentence boundary
– Abbreviations like Inc. or Dr.
– Numbers like .02% or 4.3
• Build a binary classifier
– Looks at a “.”
– Decides EndOfSentence/NotEndOfSentence
– Classifiers: hand-written rules, regular expressions, or machine-
learning
Determining if a word is end-of-sentence: a
Decision Tree
More sophisticated decision tree features
• Case of word with “.”: Upper, Lower, Cap,
Number
• Case of word after “.”: Upper, Lower, Cap,
Number

• Numeric features
– Length of word with “.”
– Probability(word with “.” occurs at end-of-s)
– Probability(word after “.” occurs at beginning-of-s)
Implementing Decision Trees
• A decision tree is just an if-then-else statement
• The interesting research is choosing the features
• Setting up the structure is often too hard to do by hand
– Hand-building only possible for very simple features, domains
• For numeric features, it’s too hard to pick each threshold
– Instead, structure usually learned by machine learning from a
training corpus
Decision Trees and other classifiers

• We can think of the questions in a decision tree

• As features that could be exploited by any kind of
classifier
– Logistic regression
– SVM
– Neural Nets
– etc.
 Basic Text
Processing

Sentence Segmentation
and Decision Trees