Force 'parser' to not segment sentences? - spacy

Is there an easy way to tell the "parser" pipe not to change the value of Token.is_sent_start ?
So, here is the story:
I am working with documents that are pre-sentencized (1 line = 1 sentence), this segmentation is all I need. I realized the parser's segmentation is not always the same as in my documents, so I don't want to rely on the segmentation made by it.
I can't change the segmentation after the parser has done it, so I cannot correct it when it makes mistakes (you get an error). And if I segment the text myself and then apply the parser, it overrules the segmentation I've just made, so it doesn't work.
So, to force keeping the original segmentation and still use a pretrained transformer model (fr_dep_news_trf), I either :
disable the parser,
add a custom Pipe to nlp to set Token.is_sent_start how I want,
create the Doc with nlp("an example")
or, I simply create a Doc with
doc = Doc(words=["an", "example"], sent_starts=[True, False])
and then I apply every element of the pipeline except the parser.
However, if I still do need the parser at some point (which I do, because I need to know some subtrees), If I simply apply it on my Doc, it overrules the segmentation already in place, so, in some cases, the segmentation is incorrect. So I do the following workaround:
Keep the correct segmentation in a list sentences = list(doc.sents)
Apply the parser on the doc
Work with whatever syntactic information the parser computed
Retrieve whatever sentencial information I need from the list I previously made, as I now cannot trust Token.is_sent_start.
It works, but it doesn't really feel right imho, it feels a bit messy. Is there an easier, cleaner way I missed ?
Something else I am considering is setting a custom extension, so that I would, for instance, use Token._.is_sent_start instead of the default Token.is_sent_start, and a custom Doc._.sents, but I fear it might be more confusing than helpful ...
Some user suggested using span.merge() for a pretty similar topic, but the function doesn't seem to exist in recent releases of spaCy (Preventing spaCy splitting paragraph numbers into sentences)

The parser is supposed to respect sentence boundaries if they are set in advance. There is one outstanding bug where this doesn't happen, but that was only in the case where some tokens had their sentence boundaries left unset.
If you set all the token boundaries to True or False (not None) and then run the parser, does it overwrite your values? If so it'd be great to have a specific example of that, because that sounds like a bug.
Given that, if you use a custom component to set your true sentence boundaries before the parser, it should work.
Regarding some of your other points...
I don't think it makes any sense to keep your sentence boundaries separate from the parser's - if you do that you can end up with subtrees that span multiple sentences, which will just be weird and unhelpful.
You didn't mention this in your question, but is treating each sentence/line as a separate doc an option? (It's not clear if you're combining multiple lines and the sentence boundaries are wrong, or if you're passing in a single line but it's turning into multiple sentences.)

Related

How to filter by tag in Jaeger

When trying to filter by tag, there is a small popup:
I have been looking for logfmt around, but all I can find is key=value format.
My questions are:
Is there a way for something more sophisticated? (starts_with, not equal, contains, etc)
I am trying to filter by url using http.url="http://example.com?bla=bla&foo=bar". I am pretty sure the value exists because I am copy/pasting from my trace. I am getting no results. Do I need to escape characters or do something else for this to work?
I did some research around logfmt as well. Based on the documentation of the original implementation and in the Python implementation of the parser (and respective tests), I would say that it doesn't support anything more sophisticated (like starts_with, not equal, contains). And this is because the output of the parser is a simple dictionary (with no regex involved in the values).
As for the second question, using the same mentioned Python parser, I was able to double-check that your filter looks fine:
from logfmt import parse_line
parse_line('http.url="http://example.com?bla=bla&foo=bar"')
Output:
{'http.url': 'http://example.com?bla=bla&foo=bar'}
This makes me suspect of an issue on the Jaeger side, but this is as far as I could go.

TFAgents: how to take into account invalid actions

I'm using TF-Agents library for reinforcement learning,
and I would like to take into account that, for a given state,
some actions are invalid.
How can this be implemented?
Should I define a "observation_and_action_constraint_splitter" function when
creating the DqnAgent?
If yes: do you know any tutorial on this?
Yes you need to define the function, pass it to the agent and also appropriately change the environment output so that the function can work with it. I am not aware on any tutorials on this, however you can look at this repo I have been working on.
Note that it is very messy and a lot of the files in there actually are not being used and the docstrings are terrible and often wrong (I forked this and didn't bother to sort everything out). However it is definetly working correctly. The parts that are relevant to your question are:
rl_env.py in the HanabiEnv.__init__ where the _observation_spec is defined as a dictionary of ArraySpecs (here). You can ignore game_obs, hand_obs and knowledge_obs which are used to run the environment verbosely, they are not fed to the agent.
rl_env.py in the HanabiEnv._reset at line 110 gives an idea of how the timestep observations are constructed and returned from the environment. legal_moves are passed through a np.logical_not since my specific environment marks legal_moves with 0 and illegal ones with -inf; whilst TF-Agents expects a 1/True for a legal move. My vector when cast to bool would therefore result in the exact opposite of what it should be for TF-agents.
These observations will then be fed to the observation_and_action_constraint_splitter in utility.py (here) where a tuple containing the observations and the action constraints is returned. Note that game_obs, hand_obs and knowledge_obs are implicitly thrown away (and not fed to the agent as previosuly mentioned.
Finally this observation_and_action_constraint_splitter is fed to the agent in utility.py in the create_agent function at line 198 for example.

How to assign lexical features to new unanalyzable tokens in spaCy?

I'm working with spaCy, version 2.3. I have a not-quite-regular-expression scanner which identifies spans of text which I don't want analyzed any further. I've added a pipe at the beginning of the pipeline, right after the tokenizer, which uses the document retokenizer to make these spans into single tokens. I'd like to remainder of the pipeline to treat these tokens as proper nouns. What's the right way to do this? I've set the POS and TAG attrs in my calls to retokenizer.merge(), and those settings persist in the resulting sentence parse, but the dependency information on these tokens makes me doubt that my settings have had the desired impact. Is there a way to update the vocabulary so that the POS tagger knows that the only POS option for these tokens is PROPN?
Thanks in advance.
The tagger and parser are independent (the parser doesn't use the tags as features), so modifying the tags isn't going to affect the dependency parse.
The tagger doesn't overwrite any existing tags, so if a tag is already set, it doesn't modify it. (The existing tags don't influence its predictions at all, though, so the surrounding words are tagged the same way they would be otherwise.)
Setting TAG and POS in the retokenizer is a good way to set those attributes. If you're not always retokenizing and you want to set the TAG and/or POS based on a regular expression for the token text, then the best way to do this is a custom pipeline component that you add before the tagger that sets tags for certain words.
The transition-based parsing algorithm can't easily deal with partial dependencies in the input, so there isn't a straightforward solution here. I can think of a few things that might help:
The parser does respect pre-set sentence boundaries. If your skipped tokens are between sentences, you can set token.is_sent_start = True for that token and the following token so that the skipped token always ends up in its own sentence. If the skipped tokens are in the middle of a sentence or you want them to be analyzed as nouns in the sentence, then this won't help.
The parser does use the token.norm feature, so if you set the NORM feature in the retokenizer to something extremely PROPN-like, you might have a better chance of getting the intended analysis. For example, if you're using a provided English model like en_core_web_sm, use a word you think would be a frequent similar proper noun in American newspaper text from 20 years ago, so if the skipped token should be like a last name, use "Bush" or "Clinton". It won't guarantee a better parse, but it could help.
If you using a model with vectors like en_core_web_lg, you can also set the vectors for the skipped token to be the same as a similar word (check that the similar word has a vector first). This is how to tell the model to refer to the same row in the vector table for UNKNOWN_SKIPPED as Bush.
The simpler option (that duplicates the vectors in the vector table internally):
nlp.vocab.set_vector("UNKNOWN_SKIPPED", nlp.vocab["Bush"].vector)
The less elegant version that doesn't duplicate vectors underneath:
nlp.vocab.vectors.add("UNKNOWN_SKIPPED", row=nlp.vocab["Bush"].rank)
nlp.vocab["UNKNOWN_SKIPPED"].rank = nlp.vocab["Bush"].rank
(The second line is only necessary to get this to work for a model that's currently loaded. If you save it as a custom model after the first line with nlp.to_disk() and reload it, then only the first line is necessary.)
If you just have a small set of skipped tokens, you could update the parser with some examples containing these tokens, but this can be tricky to do well without affecting the accuracy of the parser for other cases.
The NORM and vector modifications will also influence the tagger, so it's possible if you choose those well, you might get pretty close to the results you want.

How does spaCy tokenizer splits sentences?

I am finding the tokenization code quite complicated and I still couldn't find where in the code the sentences are split.
For example, how does the tokenizer know that
Mr. Smitt stayed at home. He was tired
should not be split in "Mr." and should be split before "He".? And where in the code does the split before "He" happens?
(In fact, I am unsure actually unsure if I am looking at the right place: if I search for sents in tokenizer.pyx I don't find any occurrence)
You access the splits via the doc object, with the generator:
doc.sents
The output of the generator is a series of spans.
As for how the splits are chosen, the document is parsed for dependency relationships. Understanding the parser is not trivial - you'll have to read into it if you want to understand it - it's using a neural network to inform the decision about how to construct the dependency trees; but the splits are those gaps between tokens which are not crossed by dependencies. This is not simply where you find a full-stop, and the method is more robust as a result.

TSearch2 - dots explosion

Following conversion
SELECT to_tsvector('english', 'Google.com');
returns this:
'google.com':1
Why does TSearch2 engine didn't return something like this?
'google':2, 'com':1
Or how can i make the engine to return the exploded string as i wrote above?
I just need "Google.com" to be foundable by "google".
Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy solution.
Denis is correct in that the parser is recognizing it as a hostname, which is why it doesn't break it up.
There are 3 other things you can do, off the top of my head.
You can disable the host parsing in the database. See postgres documentation for details. E.g. something like ALTER TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION your_parser_config
DROP MAPPING FOR url, url_path
You can write your own custom dictionary.
You can pre-parse your data before it's inserted into the database in some manner (maybe splitting all domains before going into the database).
I had a similar issue to you last year and opted for solution (2), above.
My solution was to write a custom dictionary that splits words up on non-word characters. A custom dictionary is a lot easier & quicker to write than a new parser. You still have to write C tho :)
The dictionary I wrote would return something like 'www.facebook.com':4, 'com':3, 'facebook':2, 'www':1' for the 'www.facebook.com' domain (we had a unique-ish scenario, hence the 4 results instead of 3).
The trouble with a custom dictionary is that you will no longer get stemming (ie: www.books.com will come out as www, books and com). I believe there is some work (which may have been completed) to allow chaining of dictionaries which would solve this problem.
First off in case you're not aware, tsearch2 is deprecated in favor of the built-in functionality:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9/static/textsearch.html
As for your actual question, google.com gets recognized as a host by the parser:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/textsearch-parsers.html
If you don't want this to occur, you'll need to pre-process your text accordingly (or use a custom parser).