BNOSAC is happy to announce the release of the udpipe R package (https://bnosac.github.io/udpipe/en) which is a Natural Language Processing toolkit that provides language-agnostic 'tokenization', 'parts of speech tagging', 'lemmatization', 'morphological feature tagging' and 'dependency parsing' of raw text. Next to text parsing, the package also allows you to train annotation models based on data of 'treebanks' in 'CoNLL-U' format as provided at http://universaldependencies.org/format.html.
Language models
The package provides direct access to language models trained on more than 50 languages. The following languages are directly available:
afrikaans, ancient_greek-proiel, ancient_greek, arabic, basque, belarusian, bulgarian, catalan, chinese, coptic, croatian, czech-cac, czech-cltt, czech, danish, dutch-lassysmall, dutch, english-lines, english-partut, english, estonian, finnish-ftb, finnish, french-partut, french-sequoia, french, galician-treegal, galician, german, gothic, greek, hebrew, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, irish, italian, japanese, kazakh, korean, latin-ittb, latin-proiel, latin, latvian, lithuanian, norwegian-bokmaal, norwegian-nynorsk, old_church_slavonic, persian, polish, portuguese-br, portuguese, romanian, russian-syntagrus, russian, sanskrit, serbian, slovak, slovenian-sst, slovenian, spanish-ancora, spanish, swedish-lines, swedish, tamil, turkish, ukrainian, urdu, uyghur, vietnamese
We hope that the package will allow other R users to build natural language applications on top of the resulting parts of speech tags, tokens, morphological features and dependency parsing output. And we hope in particular that applications will arise which are not limited to English only (like the textrank R package or the cleanNLP package to name a few)
Easy installation, great docs
- Note that the package has no external software dependencies (no java nor python) and depends only on 2 R packages (Rcpp and data.table), which makes the package easy to install on any platform. The package is available for download at https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=udpipe and is developed at https://github.com/bnosac/udpipe. A small docusaurus website is made available at https://bnosac.github.io/udpipe/en
- We hope you enjoy using it and we would like to thank Milan Straka for all the efforts done on UDPipe as well as all persons involved in http://universaldependencies.org
Training on Text Mining with R
Are you interested in text mining. Feel free to register for the upcoming course on text mining
Example
Want to get started with it right away? Example annotating Polish text in UTF-8 encoding, but you can pick any language of choice listed above. Enjoy.
library(udpipe)
model <- udpipe_download_model(language = "polish")
model <- udpipe_load_model(file = model$file_model)
x <- udpipe_annotate(model, x = "Budynek otrzymany od parafii wymaga remontu, a placówka nie otrzymała jeszcze żadnej dotacji.")
x <- as.data.frame(x)
x
BNOSAC is working on building an application on top of open data from questions and answers given at the parliament in Belgium. It will basically show what our civil servants in parliament are busy with. If you are interested in co-developing, feel free to get in touch for a quick chat. For those of you interested in an overview of open data available in Belgium, we've made a presentation showing what open data is available in Belgium for direct use (see below).
Interested in how open data can be used for your business, get in touch.
CRAN contains up to date (October 2017) more than 11500 R packages. If you want to scroll through all of these, you probably need to spend a few days, assuming you need 5 seconds per package and there are 8 hours in a day.
Since R version 3.4, we can also get a dataset will all packages, their dependencies, the package title, the description and even the installation errors which the packages have. Which makes the CRAN database with all packages an excellent dataset for doing text mining. If you want to get that dataset, just do as follows in R:
library(tools)
crandb <- CRAN_package_db()
Based on that data the following CRAN NLP searcher app was built as shown below. I'ts available for inspection at http://datatailor.be:9999/app/cran_search and is a tiny wrapper around the result of annotating the package title and package description using the udpipe R package: https://github.com/bnosac/udpipe
If you want to easily extract what is written in text without reading it, a common way is to do Parts of Speech tagging, extract the nouns and/or the verbs and then plot all co-occurrences / correlations and frequencies of the lemmata. The updipe package allows you exactly to do that. Annotating using Parts of Speech tagging, is pretty easy with udpipe_annotate function from the the udpipe R package (https://github.com/bnosac/udpipe). Mark that this takes a while (as in +/- 30 minutes) and is probably something you want to run as a web-service or integrated stored procedure.
library(udpipe)
ud_model <- udpipe_download_model(language = "english")
ud_model <- udpipe_load_model(ud_model$file_model)
crandb_annotated <- udpipe_annotate(ud_model,
x = paste(crandb$Title, crandb$Description, sep = " \n "),
doc_id = crandb$Package)
crandb_annotated <- as.data.frame(crandb_annotated)
Once we have that data annotated, making a web application which allows you to visualise, structure and display the CRAN packages content is pretty easy with tools like flexdashboard. That's exactly what this web application available at http://datatailor.be:9999/app/cran_search does. The application allows you
- List all packages which are part of a CRAN Task View
- To search for CRAN packages based on what the author has written in the package title and description
- Based on the found CRAN packages which were searched for: Visualise the nouns and verbs in the package title and descriptions by using
- Word-coocurrence graphs indicating how many times each lemma occurs in the same package as another lemma
- Word-correlation graphs showing the positive correlations between the top n most occurring lemma's in the packages
- Word clouds indicating the frequency of nouns/verbs or consecutive nouns/verbs (bigrams) in the package descriptions
- Build a topic model (latent dirichlet allocation) to cluster packages and visualise them
The web application (flexdashboard) was launched on a small shinyproxy server and is available here: http://datatailor.be:9999/app/cran_search. Can you find topics which are not yet covered by the CRAN task views yet? Can you find the content of the Rcpp-universe or the sp package universe?
If you are interested in these techniques, you can always subscribe for our text mining with R course at the following dates:
We use text mining a lot in day-to-day data mining operations. In order to share our knowledge on this, to show that R is an extremely mature platform to do business-oriented text analytics and to give you practical experience with text mining, our course on Text Mining with R is scheduled for the 3rd consecutive year at LStat, the Leuven Statistics Research Center (Belgium) as well as at the Data Science Academy in Brussels. Courses are scheduled 2 times in November 2017 and also in March 2018.
This course is a hands-on course covering the use of text mining tools for the purpose of data analysis. It covers basic text handling, natural language engineering and statistical modelling on top of textual data. The following items are covered.
- Text encodings
- Cleaning of text data, regular expressions
- String distances
- Graphical displays of text data
- Natural language processing: stemming, parts-of-speech tagging, tokenization, lemmatisation
- Sentiment analysis
- Statistical topic detection modelling and visualization (latent diriclet allocation)
- Visualisation of correlations & topics
- Word embeddings
- Document similarities & Text alignment
Feel free to register at the following dates:
- 18-19/10/2017: Statistical machine learning with R. Leuven (Belgium). Subscribe here
- 08+10/11/2017: Text mining with R. Leuven (Belgium). Subscribe here
- 27-28/11/2017: Text mining with R. Brussels (Belgium). http://di-academy.com/bootcamp + send mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
- 19-20/12/2017: Applied spatial modelling with R. Leuven (Belgium). Subscribe here
- 20-21/02/2018: Advanced R programming. Leuven (Belgium). Subscribe here
- 08-09/03/2018: Computer Vision with R and Python. Leuven (Belgium). Subscribe here
- 22-23/03/2018: Text Mining with R. Leuven (Belgium). Subscribe here
