We are glad that you have stuck around for this long and, just in case you have missed any parts, click through to the introduction, part 1, part 2, and part 3.
You might ask me, doesn’t Hadoop do text processing extremely well? After all, the first Hadoop jobs we learn are word count and inverted index!
The answer is that NLP preprocessing techniques are more complicated than splitting on whitespace and punctuation, and different tasks require different kinds of tokenization (also called segmentation or chunking). Consider the following sentence:
“You’re not going to the U.S.A. in that super-zeppelin, Dr. Stoddard?”
How do you split this as a stand alone sentence? If you simply used punctuation, this would segment (sentence tokenization) to six sentences (“You’re not going to the U.”, “S.”, “A.”, “in that super-zeppelin, Dr.”, “Stoddard?”). Also, is the “You’re” two tokens or a single token? What about Punctuation? Is “Dr. Stoddard” one token or more? How about “super-zeppelin”. N-Gram analysis and other syntactic tokenization will also probably require different token lengths that go beyond white space.
So we require some more formal NLP mechanisms even for simple tokenization. However, I propose that Hadoop might be perfect for language preprocessing. A Hadoop job creates output in the file system, so each job can be considered an NLP preprocessing task. Moreover, in many other Big Data analytics, Hadoop is used this way; last mile computations usually occur within 100GB of memory, Map Reduce jobs are used to perform calculations designed to transform data into something that is computable in that memory space. We will do the same thing with NLP, and transform our raw text as follows:
Raw Text → Tokenized Text → Tagged Text → Parsed Text → Treebanks
Namely, after we have tokenized our text depending on our requirements, splitting it into sentences, chunks and tokens as required, we then want to understand the syntactic class of the tokens, and tag it as such. Tagged text can then be structured into parses – a structured representation of the sentence. The final output, used for training our stochastic mechanisms and going beyond to more semantic analyses are treebanks. Each of these tasks can be one or more MapReduce jobs.
NLTK comes with a few notable built-ins making your preprocessing with Hadoop integration easier (you’ll note all these methods are stochastic):
-
Punct Word and Sentence tokenizer uses an unsupervised training set to capture the beginning of sentences and other non-sentence termination marks. It doesn’t require a single sentence to perform tokenization.
-
Brill Tagger – a transformational rule based tagger that does a first pass tagging then applies rules that were trained from a tagged training data set.
-
Viterbi Parser- a dynamic programming algorithm that uses a weighted grammar to fill in a most-likely-constituent table and very quickly come up with the most likely parse.
The end result after a series of MapReduce jobs (we had six) was a Treebank — a machine tractable syntactic representation of language; it’s very important.
The post Hadoop for Preprocessing Language – Part 4 appeared first on Data Community DC.