Introduction to Data Science

Lecture 5
Natural Language Processing

CS 194 Fall 2014

John Canny
 Outline for this Evening
• Project Suggestions Overview
• N-grams
• Grammars
• Parsing
• Dependencies
 Reminders
• You should have teams created by now (if not email us
immediately)

• On Wednesday you should submit an ordered list of 5

preferences. They can be 5 of the recommended
projects, or:

• You can submit a different project topic of your own

design (but also submit 4 other preferences from the
list).
 Tour of Project Suggestions
• Please take a look at the project suggestions online.

• Here is some background on them…

 Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• In a recent survey (KDNuggets blog) of data scientists, 62%
reported working “mostly or entirely” with data about people.
Much of this data is text.

• In the suggested CS194-16 projects (a random sample of data

science projects around campus), nearly half involve natural
language text processing.

• NLP is a central part of mining large datasets.

 Natural Language Processing
Some basic terms:
• Syntax: the allowable structures in the language: sentences,
phrases, affixes (-ing, -ed, -ment, etc.).
• Semantics: the meaning(s) of texts in the language.
• Part-of-Speech (POS): the category of a word (noun, verb,
preposition etc.).
• Bag-of-words (BoW): a featurization that uses a vector of word
counts (or binary) ignoring order.
• N-gram: for a fixed, small N (2-5 is common), an n-gram is a
consecutive sequence of words in a text.
 Bag of words Featurization
Assuming we have a dictionary mapping words to a unique integer
id, a bag-of-words featurization of a sentence could look like this:
Sentence: The cat sat on the mat
word id’s: 1 12 5 3 1 14
The BoW featurization would be the vector:
Vector 2, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1
position 1 3 5 12 14
In practice this would be stored as a sparse vector of (id, count)s:
(1,2),(3,1),(5,1),(12,1),(14,1)
Note that the original word order is lost, replaced by the order of
id’s.
 N-grams
Because word order is lost, the sentence meaning is weakened.
This sentence has quite a different meaning but the same BoW
vector:
Sentence: The mat sat on the cat
word id s: 1 14 5 3 1 12
BoW featurization:
Vector 2, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1

But word order is important, especially the order of nearby words.

N-grams capture this, by modeling tuples of consecutive words.

 N-grams
Sentence: The cat sat on the mat
2-grams: the-cat, cat-sat, sat-on, on-the, the-mat
Notice how even these short n-grams “make sense” as linguistic
units. For the other sentence we would have different features:
Sentence: The mat sat on the cat
2-grams: the-mat, mat-sat, sat-on, on-the, the-cat
We can go still further and construct 3-grams:
Sentence: The cat sat on the mat
3-grams: the-cat-sat, cat-sat-on, sat-on-the, on-the-mat
Which capture still more of the meaning:
Sentence: The mat sat on the cat
3-grams: the-mat-sat, mat-sat-on, sat-on-the, on-the-cat
 N-grams Features
Typically, its advantages to use multiple n-gram features in machine
learning models with text, e.g.

unigrams + bigrams (2-grams) + trigrams (3-grams).

The unigrams have higher counts and are able to detect influences
that are weak, while bigrams and trigrams capture strong
influences that are more specific.

e.g. “the white house” will generally have very different influences
from the sum of influences of “the”, “white”, “house”.
 N-grams size
N-grams pose some challenges in feature set size.
If the original vocabulary size is |V|, the number of 2-grams is |V|2
While for 3-grams it is |V|3

Luckily natural language n-grams (including single words) have a

power law frequency structure. This means that most of the n-
grams you see are common. A dictionary that contains the most
common n-grams will cover most of the n-grams you see.
 Power laws for N-grams
N-grams follow a power law distribution:
 N-grams size
Because of this you may see values like this:

• Unigram dictionary size: 40,000

• Bigram dictionary size: 100,000
• Trigram dictionary size: 300,000

With coverage of > 80% of the features occurring in the text.

 N-gram Language Models
N-grams can be used to build statistical models of texts.

When this is done, they are called n-gram language models.

An n-gram language model associates a probability with each n-

gram, such that the sum over all n-grams (for fixed n) is 1.

You can then determine the overall likelihood of a particular

sentence:
The cat sat on the mat
Is much more likely than
The mat sat on the cat
 Skip-grams
We can also analyze the meaning of a particular word by looking at
the contexts in which it occurs.

The context is the set of words that occur near the word, i.e. at
displacements of …,-3,-2,-1,+1,+2,+3,… in each sentence where the
word occurs.

A skip-gram is a set of non-consecutive words (with specified

offset), that occur in some sentence.

We can construct a BoSG (bag of skip-gram) representation for

each word from the skip-gram table.
 Skip-grams
Then with a suitable embedding (DNN or linear projection) of the
skip-gram features, we find that word meaning has an algebraic
structure:
Man
King

Woman
Queen

Man + (King – Man) + (Woman – Man) = Queen

Tomáš Mikolov et al. (2013). "Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in

Vector Space"
5-min break
 Outline for this Evening
• Project Suggestions Overview
• N-grams
• Grammars
• Parsing
• Dependencies
 Parts of Speech
Thrax’s original list (c. 100 B.C):
• Noun
• Verb
• Pronoun
• Preposition
• Adverb
• Conjunction
• Participle
• Article
 Parts of Speech
Thrax’s original list (c. 100 B.C):
• Noun (boat, plane, Obama)
• Verb (goes, spun, hunted)
• Pronoun (She, Her)
• Preposition (in, on)
• Adverb (quietly, then)
• Conjunction (and, but)
• Participle (eaten, running)
• Article (the, a)
 Parts of Speech (Penn Treebank 2014)
1. CC Coordinating conjunction 19. PRP$ Possessive pronoun
2. CD Cardinal number 20. RB Adverb
3. DT Determiner 21. RBR Adverb, comparative
4. EX Existential there 22. RBS Adverb, superlative
5. FW Foreign word 23. RP Particle
Preposition or subordinating 24. SYM Symbol
6. IN
conjunction 25. TO to
7. JJ Adjective 26. UH Interjection
8. JJR Adjective, comparative 27. VB Verb, base form
9. JJS Adjective, superlative 28. VBD Verb, past tense
10. LS List item marker 29. VBG Verb, gerund or present participle
11. MD Modal 30. VBN Verb, past participle
12. NN Noun, singular or mass Verb, non-3rd person singular
31. VBP
13. NNS Noun, plural present
14. NNP Proper noun, singular 32. VBZ Verb, 3rd person singular present
15. NNPS Proper noun, plural 33. WDT Wh-determiner
16. PDT Predeterminer 34. WP Wh-pronoun
17. POS Possessive ending 35. WP$ Possessive wh-pronoun
18. PRP Personal pronoun 36. WRB Wh-adverb
 Grammars
Grammars comprise rules that specify acceptable sentences in the
language: (S is the sentence or root node)
• S  NP VP
• S  NP VP PP
• NP  DT NN
• VP  VB NP
• VP  VBD
• PP  IN NP
• DT  “the”
• NN  “mat”, “cat”
• VBD  “sat”
• IN  “on”
 Grammars
Grammars comprise rules that specify acceptable sentences in the
language: (S is the sentence or root node) “the cat sat on the mat”
• S  NP VP
• S  NP VP PP (the cat) (sat) (on the mat)
• NP  DT NN (the cat), (the mat)
• VP  VB NP
• VP  VBD
• PP  IN NP
• DT  “the”
• NN  “mat”, “cat”
• VBD  “sat”
• IN  “on”
 Grammars
English Grammars are context-free: the productions do not depend
on any words before or after the production.

The reconstruction of a sequence of grammar productions from a

sentence is called “parsing” the sentence.

It is most conveniently represented as a tree:

 Parse Trees
“The cat sat on the mat”
 Parse Trees
In bracket notation:

(ROOT
(S
(NP (DT the) (NN cat))
(VP (VBD sat)
(PP (IN on)
(NP (DT the) (NN mat))))))
 Grammars

There are typically multiple ways to produce the same sentence.

Consider the statement by Groucho Marx:

“While I was in Africa, I shot an elephant in my pajamas”

“How he got into my pajamas, I don’t know”
 Parse Trees
“…,I shot an elephant in my pajamas” -what people hear first
 Parse Trees
Groucho’s version
 Grammars
Recursion is common in grammar rules, e.g.
NP  NP RC
Because of this, sentences of arbitrary length are possible.
 Recursion in Grammars
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”.
 Grammars

Its also possible to have “sentences” inside other sentences…

S  NP VP
VP  VB NP SBAR
SBAR  IN S
 Recursion in Grammars
“Nero played his lyre while Rome burned”.
 PCFGs
Complex sentences can be parsed in many ways, most of which
make no sense or are extremely improbable (like Groucho’s
example).

Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars (PCFGs) associate and learn

probabilities for each rule:
S  NP VP 0.3
S  NP VP PP 0.7

The parser then tries to find the most likely sequence of

productions that generate the given sentence. This adds more
realistic “world knowledge” and generally gives much better results.
Most state-of-the-art parsers these days use PCFGs.
 Systems
• NLTK: Python-based NLP system. Many modules, good
visualization tools, but not quite state-of-the-art performance.

• Stanford Parser: Another comprehensive suite of tools (also POS

tagger), and state-of-the-art accuracy. Has the definitive
dependency module.

• Berkeley Parser: Slightly higher parsing accuracy (than Stanford)

but not as many modules.

• Note: high-quality parsing is usually very slow, but see:

https://github.com/dlwh/puck
 Outline for this Evening
• Project Suggestions Overview
• N-grams
• Grammars
• Parsing
• Dependencies
 Dependencies
In a constituency parse, there is no direct relation between the
constituents and words from the sentence (except for leaf nodes
which produce a single word).

In dependency parsing, the idea is to decompose the sentence into

relations directly between words.

This is an older, and some argue more natural, decomposition of the

sentence. It also often makes semantic interpretation (based on the
meanings of the words) easier.

Lets look at a simple example:

 Dependencies
“The cat sat on the mat”
dependency tree parse tree

constituency labels of leaf nodes

 Dependencies
From the dependency tree, we can obtain a “sketch” of the
sentence. i.e. by starting at the root we can look down one level to
get:
“cat sat on”
And then by looking for the object of the prepositional child, we get:
“cat sat on mat”
We can easily ignore determiners “a, the”.

And importantly, adjectival and adverbial modifiers generally

connect to their targets:
 Dependencies
“Brave Merida prepared for a long, cold winter”
 Dependencies
“Russell reveals himself here as a supremely gifted director of
actors”
 Dependencies
Stanford dependencies are constructed from the output of a
constituency parser (so you can in principle use other parsers).

The mapping is based on hand-written regular expressions.

Dependency grammars have been widely used for sentiment

analysis and for semantic embedings of sentences.
 Summary
• Project Suggestions Overview
• N-grams
• Grammars
• Parsing
• Dependencies