About the Pre-Process

The preprocessing adds the metadata that iepy needs to detect the relations, which includes:

  • Text tokenization and sentence splitting.
  • Text lemmatization
  • Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging.
  • Named Entity Recognition (NER).
  • Gazettes resolution
  • Syntactic parsing.
  • TextSegments creation (internal IEPY text unit).

We’re currently running all this steps (except the last one) using the Stanford CoreNLP tools. This runs in a all-in-one run, but every step can be modified to use a custom version that adjust your needs.

About the Tokenization and Sentence splitting

The text of each Document is split on tokens and sentences, and that information is stored on the document itself, preserving (and also storing) for each token the offset (in chars) to the original document text.

The one used by default it’s the one that the Stanford CoreNLP provides.

Note

While using the Stanford tokenizer, you can customize some of tokenization options.

First read here: tokenizer options

On your instance settings.py file, add options as keys on the CORENLP_TKN_OPTS dict. You can use as key any of the “known options”, and as value, use True or False for booleans, or just strings when option requires a text. Example:

CORENLP_TKN_OPTS = {
    'latexQuotes': False
}

Lemmatization

Note

Lemmatization was added on the version 0.9.2, all instances that were created before that, need to run the preprocess script again. This will run only the lemmatization step.

The text runs through a step of lemmatization where each token gets a lemma. This is a canonical form of the word that can be used in the classifier features or the rules core.

Part of speech tagging (POS)

Each token is augmented with metadata about its part of speech such as noun, verb, adjective and other grammatical tags. Along the token itself, this may used by the NER to detect an entity occurrence. This information is also stored on the Document itself, together with the tokens.

The one used by default it’s the one that the Stanford CoreNLP provides.

Named Entity Recognition (NER)

To find a relation between entities one must first recognize these entities in the text.

As an result of NER, each document is added with information about all the found Named Entities (together with which tokens are involved in each occurrence).

An automatic NER is used to find occurrences of an entity in the text.

The default pre-process uses the Stanford NER, check the Stanford CoreNLP’s documentation to find out which entity kinds are supported, but includes:

  • Location
  • Person
  • Organization
  • Date
  • Number
  • Time
  • Money
  • Percent

Others remarkable features of this NER (that are incorporated to the default pre-process) are:

  • pronoun resolution
  • simple co-reference resolution

This step can be customized to find entities of kinds defined by you, or anything else you may need.

Gazettes resolution

In case you want to add named entity recognition by matching literals, iepy provides a system of gazettes. This is a mapping of literals and entity kinds that will be run on top of the basic stanford NER. With this, you’ll be able to recognize entities out of the ones done by the stanford NER, or even correct those that are incorrectly tagged.

Learn more about here.

Syntactic parsing

Note

Syntactic parsing was added on the version 0.9.3, all instances that were created before that, need to run the preprocess script again. This will run only the syntactic parsing step.

The sentences are parsed to works out the syntactic structure. Each sentence gets an structure tree that is stored in Penn Treebank notation. IEPY presents this to the user using a NLTK Tree object.

By default the sentences are processed with the Stanford Parser provided within the Stanford CoreNLP.

For example, the syntactic parsing of the sentence Join the dark side, we have cookies would be:

(ROOT
  (S
    (S
      (VP (VBN Join)
        (NP (DT the) (JJ dark) (NN side))))
    (, ,)
    (NP (PRP we))
    (VP (VBP have)
      (NP (NNS cookies)))))

About the Text Segmentation

IEPY works on a text segment (or simply segment) level, meaning that will try to find if a relation is present within a segment of text. The pre-process is the responsible for splitting the documents into segments.

The default pre-process uses a segmenter that creates for documents with the following criteria:

  • for each sentence on the document, if there are at least 2 Entity Occurrences in there

How to customize

On your own IEPY instances, there’s a file called preprocess.py located in the bin folder. There you’ll find that the default is simply run the Stanford preprocess, and later the segmenter. This can be changed to run a sequence of steps defined by you

For example, take this pseudo-code to guide you:

pipeline = PreProcessPipeline([
    CustomTokenizer(),
    CustomSentencer(),
    CustomLemmatizer(),
    CustomPOSTagger(),
    CustomNER(),
    CustomSegmenter(),
], docs)
pipeline.process_everything()

Note

The steps can be functions or callable objects. We recommend objects because generally you’ll want to do some load up of things on the __init__ method to avoid loading everything over and over again.

Each one of those steps will be called with each one of the documents, meaning that every step will be called with all the documents, after finishing with that the next step will be called with each one of the documents.

Running in multiple cores

Preprocessing might take a lot of time. To handle this you can run the preprocessing on several cores of the same machine or even run it on differents machines to accelerate the processing.

To run it on the same machine using multiple cores, all you need to do is run:

$ python bin/preprocess.py --multiple-cores=all

This will use all the available cores. You can also specify a number if you want to use less than that, like this:

$ python bin/preprocess.py --multiple-cores=2

Running in multiple machines

Running the preprocess on different machines it’s a bit tricky, here’s what you’ll need:

  • A iepy instance with a database that allows remote access (such as postgres)
  • One iepy instance on each extra machine that has the database setting pointing to the main one.

Then you’ll need to decide on how many parts do you want to split the document set and run each part on a different machine. For example, you could split the documents in 4 and run 2 processes on one machine and 2 on another one. To do this you’ll run:

On one of the machines, in two different consoles run:

$ python bin/preprocess.py --split-in=4 --run-part=1

$ python bin/preprocess.py --split-in=4 --run-part=2

And on the other machine:

$ python bin/preprocess.py --split-in=4 --run-part=3

$ python bin/preprocess.py --split-in=4 --run-part=4