1. Words and Corpora

• corpus(corpora)
  A collection of text or speech
• lemma
  A lemma is a set of forms having the same stem, the same major part-of-speech, and the same word sense.
• Word Type
  Types are the number of distinct words in a corpus.
• Word Token
  Tokens are the total number N of running words

e.g. They picnicked by the pool, then lay back on the grass and looked at the stars.

The sentence above has 16 tokens and 14 types.

• Herdan's Law or Heap's Law
  $$|V|=kN^β$$

  • The number of types ----- |V|

  • The number of tokens ---- N

  • k and β are positive constants, and 0<β<1.

2. Text Normalization

possible procedures

• Remove unwanted formatting(e.g. HTML)
• Segment structure(e.g. sentences)
• Tokenise words
• Normalise words
• Remove unwanted words(e.g. Stop words)

2.1 Segmenting/Tokenizing

Tokenization: The task of segmenting running text into words

• expanding clitic: 'm in I'm expands to am

2.2 Normalizing

• Normalization: The task of putting words/tokens in a standard format
• Case folding: everything mapped to lower case
• Removing morphology
  • Lemmatization: The task of determining that two words have the same root, despite their surface differences.(e.g. is, are, am share lemma be)

lemmatizer = nltk.stem.wordnet.WordNetLemmatizer()
def lemmatize(word):
    lemma = lemmatizer.lemmatize(word,'v')
    if lemma == word:
        lemma = lemmatizer.lemmatize(word,'n')
    return lemma

• Stemming:

  • stems: the central morpheme of the word, supply the main meaning, often not an actual lexical item.
  • affixes: adding 'additional' meanings of various words

  Stemming strips off all affixes, leaving a stem. e.g. automate --> automat

  • the Porter Stemmer(most popular stemmer for English

  stemmer = nltk.stem.porter.PorterStemmer()
  print ([stemmer.stem(token) for token in tokenized_sentence])
  

• Correct spelling

• expanding abbreviations

2.3 Segmenting

• the MaxMatch algorithm
  used to segment in Chinese.

The maximum matching algorithm starts by pointing at the beginning of a string. It chooses the longest word in the dictionary that matches the input at the current position. The pointer is then advanced to the end of that word in the string. If no word matches, the pointer is instead advanced one character. The algorithm is then iteratively applied again starting from the new Pointer position.^[1]

The code below is an example of the MaxMatch algorithm in English, however, the algorithm works better in Chinese than English.

def max_match(text_string, dictionary, word_list):
    '''
    @para: text_string: an alphabetic characters string
    @para: dictionary: existing dict
    @word_list: a collection used to store matched words.

    This method is used to find words existed in the dictionary from an alphabetic characters string.
    '''
    if len(text_string) <= 0:
          return word_list
    for i in range(len(text_string), 1, -1):
        first_word = text_string[:i]
        remainder = text_string[i:]
        if lemmatize(first_word) in dictionary: # todo first_word need to be lemma
            break
    else:
        first_word = text_string[0]
        remainder = text_string[1:]

    word_list.append(first_word)
    return max_match(remainder, dictionary, word_list)

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1. J&M3 Ch2, P15 ↩