Words and Corpora

Basic Text
Processing
How many words in a sentence?
"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 in a sentence?
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 in a corpus?
N = number of tokens
V = vocabulary = set of types, |V| is size of vocabulary
Heaps Law = Herdan's Law = where often .67 < β < .75
i.e., vocabulary size grows with > square root of the number of word tokens

Tokens = N Types = |V|

Switchboard phone conversations 2.4 million 20 thousand
Shakespeare 884,000 31 thousand
COCA 440 million 2 million
Google N-grams 1 trillion 13+ million
Corpora
Words don't appear out of nowhere!
A text is produced by
• a specific writer(s),
• at a specific time,
• in a specific variety,
• of a specific language,
• for a specific function.
Corpora vary along dimensions like
◦ Language: 7097 languages in the world
◦ Variety, like African American Language varieties.
◦ AAE Twitter posts might include forms like "iont" (I don't)
◦ Code switching, e.g., Spanish/English, Hindi/English:
S/E: Por primera vez veo a @username actually being hateful! It was beautiful:)
[For the first time I get to see @username actually being hateful! it was beautiful:) ]
H/E: dost tha or ra- hega ... dont wory ... but dherya rakhe
[“he was and will remain a friend ... don’t worry ... but have faith”]
◦ Genre: newswire, fiction, scientific articles, Wikipedia
◦ Author Demographics: writer's age, gender, ethnicity, SES
Corpus datasheets
Gebru et al (2020), Bender and Friedman (2018)

Motivation:
• Why was the corpus collected?
• By whom?
• Who funded it?
Situation: In what situation was the text written?
Collection process: If it is a subsample how was it sampled? Was
there consent? Pre-processing?
+Annotation process, language variety, demographics, etc.
 Words and Corpora
Basic Text
Processing
 Word tokenization
Basic Text
Processing
Text Normalization

Every NLP task requires text normalization:

1. Tokenizing (segmenting) words
2. Normalizing word formats
3. Segmenting sentences
Space-based tokenization
A very simple way to tokenize
◦ For languages that use space characters between words
◦ Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, etc., based writing systems
◦ Segment off a token between instances of spaces
Unix tools for space-based tokenization
◦ The "tr" command
◦ Inspired by Ken Church's UNIX for Poets
◦ Given a text file, output the word tokens and their frequencies
 Simple Tokenization in UNIX
(Inspired by Ken Church’s UNIX for Poets.)
Given a text file, output the word tokens and their frequencies
tr -sc ’A-Za-z’ ’\n’ < shakes.txt Change all non-alpha to
newlines
| sort Sort in alphabetical order
| uniq –c
Merge and count each type

1945 A
72 AARON
19 ABBESS
5 ABBOT 25 Aaron
6 Abate
... ...
1 Abates
5 Abbess
6 Abbey
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 What happened here?
10839 my
10005 in
8954 d
Issues in Tokenization
Can't just blindly remove punctuation:
◦ m.p.h., Ph.D., AT&T, cap’n
◦ prices ($45.55)
◦ dates (01/02/06)
◦ URLs (http://www.northwestern.edu)
◦ hashtags (#nlproc)
◦ email addresses ([email protected])
Clitic: a word that doesn't stand on its own
◦ "are" in we're, French "je" in j'ai, "le" in l'honneur
When should multiword expressions (MWE) be words?
◦ New York, rock ’n’ roll
Tokenization in NLTK
Bird, Loper and Klein (2009), Natural Language Processing with Python. O’Reilly
Tokenization in languages without
spaces
Many languages (like Chinese, Japanese, Thai) don't
use spaces to separate words!

How do we decide where the token boundaries

should be?
 Word tokenization in Chinese
Chinese words are composed of characters called
"hanzi" (or sometimes just "zi")
Each one represents a meaning unit called a morpheme.
Each word has on average 2.4 of them.
But deciding what counts as a word is complex and not
agreed upon.
How to do word tokenization in
Chinese?
姚明进入总决赛 “Yao Ming reaches the finals”
3 words?
姚明 进入 总决赛
YaoMing reaches finals
5 words?
姚 明 进入 总 决赛
Yao Ming reaches overall finals
7 characters? (don't use words at all):
姚 明 进 入 总 决 赛
Yao Ming enter enter overall decision game
How to do word tokenization in
Chinese?
姚明进入总决赛 “Yao Ming reaches the finals”
3 words?
姚明 进入 总决赛
YaoMing reaches finals
5 words?
姚 明 进入 总 决赛
Yao Ming reaches overall finals
7 characters? (don't use words at all):
姚 明 进 入 总 决 赛
Yao Ming enter enter overall decision game
How to do word tokenization in
Chinese?
姚明进入总决赛 “Yao Ming reaches the finals”
3 words?
姚明 进入 总决赛
YaoMing reaches finals
5 words?
姚 明 进入 总 决赛
Yao Ming reaches overall finals
7 characters? (don't use words at all):
姚 明 进 入 总 决 赛
Yao Ming enter enter overall decision game
How to do word tokenization in
Chinese?
姚明进入总决赛 “Yao Ming reaches the finals”
3 words?
姚明 进入 总决赛
YaoMing reaches finals
5 words?
姚 明 进入 总 决赛
Yao Ming reaches overall finals
7 characters? (don't use words at all):
姚 明 进 入 总 决 赛
Yao Ming enter enter overall decision game
Word tokenization / segmentation
So in Chinese it's common to just treat each character
(zi) as a token.
• So the segmentation step is very simple
In other languages (like Thai and Japanese), more
complex word segmentation is required.
• The standard algorithms are neural sequence models
trained by supervised machine learning.
 Word tokenization
Basic Text
Processing
 Byte Pair Encoding
Basic Text
Processing
Another option for text tokenization
Instead of
• white-space segmentation
• single-character segmentation
Use the data to tell us how to tokenize.
Subword tokenization (because tokens can be parts
of words as well as whole words)
Subword tokenization
Three common algorithms:
◦ Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) (Sennrich et al., 2016)
◦ Unigram language modeling tokenization (Kudo, 2018)
◦ WordPiece (Schuster and Nakajima, 2012)
All have 2 parts:
◦ A token learner that takes a raw training corpus and induces
a vocabulary (a set of tokens).
◦ A token segmenter that takes a raw test sentence and
tokenizes it according to that vocabulary
Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) token learner
Let vocabulary be the set of all individual characters
= {A, B, C, D,…, a, b, c, d….}
Repeat:
◦ Choose the two symbols that are most frequently
adjacent in the training corpus (say 'A', 'B')
◦ Add a new merged symbol 'AB' to the vocabulary
◦ Replace every adjacent 'A' 'B' in the corpus with 'AB'.
Until k merges have been done.
BPE token learner algorithm
Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) Addendum
Most subword algorithms are run inside
space-separated tokens.
So we commonly first add a special end-of-word
symbol '__' before space in training corpus
Next, separate into letters.
 BPE token learner
Original (very fascinating🙄) corpus:
low low low low low lowest lowest newer newer newer
newer newer newer wider wider wider new new

Add end-of-word tokens, resulting in this vocabulary:

representation
 BPE token learner

Merge e r to er
 BPE

Merge er _ to er_
 BPE

Merge n e to ne
 BPE
The next merges are:
BPE token segmenter algorithm
On the test data, run each merge learned from the
training data:
◦ Greedily
◦ In the order we learned them
◦ (test frequencies don't play a role)
So: merge every e r to er, then merge er _ to er_, etc.
Result:
◦ Test set "n e w e r _" would be tokenized as a full word
◦ Test set "l o w e r _" would be two tokens: "low er_"
Properties of BPE tokens
Usually include frequent words
And frequent subwords
• Which are often morphemes like -est or –er
A morpheme is the smallest meaning-bearing unit of a
language
• unlikeliest has 3 morphemes un-, likely, and -est
 Byte Pair Encoding
Basic Text
Processing
 Word Normalization and
other issues
Basic Text
Processing
Word Normalization
Putting words/tokens in a standard format
◦ U.S.A. or USA
◦ uhhuh or uh-huh
◦ Fed or fed
◦ am, is, be, are
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

Represent all words as their lemma, their shared root

= dictionary headword form:
◦ am, are, is → be
◦ car, cars, car's, cars' → car
◦ Spanish quiero (‘I want’), quieres (‘you want’)
→ querer ‘want'
◦ He is reading detective stories
→ He be read detective story
Lemmatization is done by Morphological
Parsing
Morphemes:
◦ The small meaningful units that make up words
◦ Stems: The core meaning-bearing units
◦ Affixes: Parts that adhere to stems, often with grammatical
functions
Morphological Parsers:
◦ Parse cats into two morphemes cat and s
◦ Parse Spanish amaren (‘if in the future they would love’) into
morpheme amar ‘to love’, and the morphological features
3PL and future subjunctive.
 Stemming
Reduce terms to stems, chopping off affixes crudely
This was not the map we
Thi wa not the map we
found in Billy Bones’s
found in Billi Bone s chest
chest, but an accurate
but an accur copi complet
copy, complete in all
in all thing name and
things-names and heights
height and sound with the
and soundings-with the
singl except of the red
single exception of the
cross and the written note
red crosses and the
.
written notes.
Porter Stemmer
Based on a series of rewrite rules run in series
◦ A cascade, in which output of each pass fed to next pass
Some sample rules:
Dealing with complex morphology is
necessary for many languages
◦ e.g., the Turkish word:
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’
 Sentence Segmentation
!, ? mostly unambiguous but period “.” is very ambiguous
◦ Sentence boundary
◦ Abbreviations like Inc. or Dr.
◦ Numbers like .02% or 4.3
Common algorithm: Tokenize first: use rules or ML to
classify a period as either (a) part of the word or (b) a
sentence-boundary.
◦ An abbreviation dictionary can help
Sentence segmentation can then often be done by rules
based on this tokenization.
 Word Normalization and
other issues
Basic Text
Processing