1. Text Models

2. Why? • To “understand” text • To assist in text search & ranking • For autocompletion • Part of Speech Tagging

3. Simple application: spelling suggestions • Say that we have a dictionary of words • Real dictionary or the result of crawling • Sentences instead of words • Now we are given a word w not in the dictionary • How can we correct it to something in the dictionary

4. String editing • Given two strings (sequences) the “distance” between the two strings is defined by the minimum number of “character edit operations” needed to turn one sequence into the other. • Edit operations: delete, insert, modify (a character) • Cost assigned to each operation (e.g. uniform =1 )

5. Edit distance • Already a simple model for languages • Modeling the creation of strings (and errors in them) through simple edit operations

6. Distance between strings • Edit distance between strings = minimum number of edit operations that can be used to get from one string to the other • Symmetric because of the particular choice of edit operations and uniform cost • distance(“WillliamCohon”,“William Cohen”) • 2

7. Finding the edit distance • An “alignment” problem • Deciding how to align the two strings • Can we try all alignments? • How many (reasonable options) are there?

8. Dynamic Programming • An umbrella name for a collection of algorithms • Main idea: reuse computation for sub-problems, combined in different ways

9. Example: Fibonnaci if n = 0 or n = 1 return n else return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2) Exponential time!

10. Fib with Dynamic Programming table = {} def fib(n): global table if table.has_key(n): return table[n] if n == 0 or n == 1: table[n] = n return n else: value = fib(n-1) + fib(n-2) table[n] = value return value

12. Using a partial solution • Partial solution: • Alignment of s up to location i, with t up to location j • How to reuse? • Try all options for the “last” operation

15. Base case : D(i,0)=I, D(0,i)=i for i inserts \ deletions • Easy to generalize to arbitrary cost functions!

16. Models • Bag-of-words • N-grams • Hidden Markov Models • Probabilistic Context Free Grammar

17. Bag-of-words • Every document is represented as a bag of the words it contains • Bag means that we keep the multiplicity (=number of occurrences) of each word • Very simple, but we lose all track of structure

18. n-grams • Limited structure • Sliding window of n words

19. n-gram model

20. How would we infer the probabilities? • Issues: • Overfitting • Probability 0

21. How would we infer the probabilities? • Maximum Likelihood:

22. "add-one" (Laplace) smoothing • V = Vocabulary size

23. Good-Turing Estimate

24. Good-Turing

25. More than a fixed n..Linear Interpolation

26. Precision vs. Recall

27. Richer Models • HMM • PCFG

28. Motivation: Part-of-Speech Tagging • Useful for ranking • For machine translation • Word-Sense Disambiguation • …

29. Part-of-Speech Tagging • Tag this word. This word is a tag. • He dogs like a flea • The can is in the fridge • The sailor dogs me every day

30. A Learning Problem • Training set: tagged corpus • Most famous is the Brown Corpus with about 1M words • The goal is to learn a model from the training set, and then perform tagging of untagged text • Performance tested on a test-set

31. Simple Algorithm • Assign to each word its most popular tag in the training set • Problem: Ignores context • Dogs, tag will always be tagged as a noun… • Can will be tagged as a verb • Still, achieves around 80% correctness for real-life test-sets • Goes up to as high as 90% when combined with some simple rules

32. (HMM)Hidden Markov Model • Model: sentences are generated by a probabilistic process • In particular, a Markov Chain whose states correspond to Parts-of-Speech • Transitions are probabilistic • In each state a word is outputted • The output word is again chosen probabilistically based on the state

33. HMM • HMM is: • A set of N states • A set of M symbols (words) • A matrix NXN of transition probabilities Ptrans • A vector of size N of initial state probabilities Pstart • A matrix NXM of emissions probabilities Pout • “Hidden” because we see only the outputs, not the sequence of states traversed

34. Example

35. 3 Fundamental Problems 1) Compute the probability of a given observation Sequence (=sentence) 2) Given an observation sequence, find the most likely hidden state sequence This is tagging 3) Given a training set find the model that would make the observations most likely

36. Tagging • Find the most likely sequence of states that led to an observed output sequence • Problem: exponentially many possible sequences!

37. Viterbi Algorithm • Dynamic Programming • Vt,k is the probability of the most probable state sequence • Generating the first t + 1 observations (X0,..Xt) • And terminating at state k

38. Viterbi Algorithm • Dynamic Programming • Vt,k is the probability of the most probable state sequence • Generating the first t + 1 observations (X0,..Xt) • And terminating at state k • V0,k = Pstart(k)*Pout(k,X0) • Vt,k= Pout(k,Xt)*max{Vt-1k’ *Ptrans(k’,k)}

39. Finding the path • Note that we are interested in the most likely path, not only in its probability • So we need to keep track at each point of the argmax • Combine them to form a sequence • What about top-k?

40. Complexity • O(T*|S|^2) • Where T is the sequence (=sentence) length, |S| is the number of states (= number of possible tags)

41. Computing the probability of a sequence • Forward probabilities: αt(k) is the probability of seeing the sequence X1…Xt and terminating at state k • Backward probabilities: βt(k) is the probability of seeing the sequence Xt+1…Xn given that the Markov process is at state k at time t.

42. Computing the probabilities Forward algorithm α0(k)= Pstart(k)*Pout(k,X0) αt(k)= Pout(k,Xt)*Σk’{αt-1k’ *Ptrans(k’,k)} P(O1,…On)= Σk αn(k) Backward algorithm βt(k) = P(Ot+1…On| state at time t is k) βt(k) = Σk’{Ptrans(k,k’)* Pout(k’,Xt+1)* βt+1(k’)} βn(k) = 1 for all k P(O)= Σk β0(k)* Pstart(k)

43. Learning the HMM probabilities • Expectation-Maximization Algorithm • Start with initial probabilities • Compute Eij the expected number of transitions from i to j while generating a sequence, for each i,j (see next) • Set the probability of transition from i to j to be Eij/ (ΣkEik) 4. Similarly for omission probability 5. Repeat 2-4 using the new model, until convergence

44. Estimating the expectancies • By sampling • Re-run a random a execution of the model 100 times • Count transitions • By analysis • Use Bayes rule on the formula for sequence probability • Called the Forward-backward algorithm

45. Accuracy • Tested experimentally • Exceeds 96% for the Brown corpus • Trained on half and tested on the other half • Compare with the 80-90% by the trivial algorithm • The hard cases are few but are very hard..

46. NLTK • http://www.nltk.org/ • Natrual Language ToolKit • Open source python modules for NLP tasks • Including stemming, POS tagging and much more

47. Context Free Grammars • Context Free Grammars are a more natural model for Natural Language • Syntax rules are very easy to formulate using CFGs • Provably more expressive than Finite State Machines • E.g. Can check for balanced parentheses

48. Context Free Grammars • Non-terminals • Terminals • Production rules • V → w where V is a non-terminal and w is a sequence of terminals and non-terminals

49. Context Free Grammars • Can be used as acceptors • Can be used as a generative model • Similarly to the case of Finite State Machines • How long can a string generated by a CFG be?

50. Stochastic Context Free Grammar • Non-terminals • Terminals • Production rules associated with probability • V → w where V is a non-terminal and w is a sequence of terminals and non-terminals