Chunk Extraction with NLTK

February 23, 2009 at 4:02 pm (programming, python) (, , , , , )

Chunk extraction is a useful preliminary step to information extraction, that creates parse trees from unstructured text. Once you have a parse tree of a sentence, you can do more specific information extraction, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction.

Chunking is basically a 3 step process:

  1. Tag a sentence
  2. Chunk the tagged sentence
  3. Analyze the parse tree to extract information

I’ve already written about how to train a part of speech tagger and a chunker, so I’ll assume you’ve already done the training, and now you want to use your tagger and chunker to do something useful.

Tag Chunker


import nltk.chunk
import itertools

class TagChunker(nltk.chunk.ChunkParserI):
    def __init__(self, chunk_tagger):
        self._chunk_tagger = chunk_tagger

    def parse(self, tokens):
        # split words and part of speech tags
        (words, tags) = zip(*tokens)
        # get IOB chunk tags
        chunks = self._chunk_tagger.tag(tags)
        # join words with chunk tags
        wtc = itertools.izip(words, chunks)
        # create tree from conll formatted chunk lines

Chunk Extraction

Now that we have a proper chunker, we can use it to extract chunks. Here’s a simple example that tags a sentence, chunks the tagged sentence, then prints out each noun phrase.

# sentence should be a list of words
tagged = tagger.tag(sentence)
tree = chunker.parse(tagged)
# for each noun phrase sub tree in the parse tree
    print subtree.leaves()


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How to Train a NLTK Chunker





import nltk.chunk

def conll_tag_chunks(chunk_sents):
    tag_sents = [nltk.chunk.tree2conlltags(tree) for tree in chunk_sents]



import nltk.corpus, nltk.tag

def ubt_conll_chunk_accuracy(train_sents, test_sents):
    train_chunks = conll_tag_chunks(train_sents)
    test_chunks = conll_tag_chunks(test_sents)

    u_chunker = nltk.tag.UnigramTagger(train_chunks)
    print 'u:', nltk.tag.accuracy(u_chunker, test_chunks)

    ub_chunker = nltk.tag.BigramTagger(train_chunks, backoff=u_chunker)
    print 'ub:', nltk.tag.accuracy(ub_chunker, test_chunks)

    ubt_chunker = nltk.tag.TrigramTagger(train_chunks, backoff=ub_chunker)
    print 'ubt:', nltk.tag.accuracy(ubt_chunker, test_chunks)

    ut_chunker = nltk.tag.TrigramTagger(train_chunks, backoff=u_chunker)
    print 'ut:', nltk.tag.accuracy(ut_chunker, test_chunks)

    utb_chunker = nltk.tag.BigramTagger(train_chunks, backoff=ut_chunker)
    print 'utb:', nltk.tag.accuracy(utb_chunker, test_chunks)

# conll chunking accuracy test
conll_train = nltk.corpus.conll2000.chunked_sents('train.txt')
conll_test = nltk.corpus.conll2000.chunked_sents('test.txt')
ubt_conll_chunk_accuracy(conll_train, conll_test)

# treebank chunking accuracy test
treebank_sents = nltk.corpus.treebank_chunk.chunked_sents()
Accuracy for Trained Chunker

Accuracy for Trained Chunker




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Part of Speech Tagging with NLTK – Part 3

December 3, 2008 at 10:14 am (python) (, , , )

In part 2, I showed how to produce a part-of-speech tagger using Ngram tagging in combination with Affix and Regex tagging, with accuracy approaching 90%. In part 3, I’ll use the BrillTagger to get the accuracy up to and over 90%.

Brill Tagging

The BrillTagger is different than the previous taggers. For one, it’s not a SequentialBackoffTagger, though it does use an initial tagger, which in our case will be the raubt_tagger from part 2. The BrillTagger uses the initial tagger to produce initial tags, then corrects those tags based on transformational rules. These rules are learned by training with the FastBrillTaggerTrainer and rules templates. Here’s an example, with templates copied from the demo() function in Refer to part 1 for the backoff_tagger function and the train_sents, and part 2 for the word_patterns.

import nltk.tag
from nltk.tag import brill

raubt_tagger = backoff_tagger(train_sents, [nltk.tag.AffixTagger,
    nltk.tag.UnigramTagger, nltk.tag.BigramTagger, nltk.tag.TrigramTagger],

templates = [
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateTagsRule, (1,1)),
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateTagsRule, (2,2)),
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateTagsRule, (1,2)),
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateTagsRule, (1,3)),
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateWordsRule, (1,1)),
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateWordsRule, (2,2)),
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateWordsRule, (1,2)),
    brill.SymmetricProximateTokensTemplate(brill.ProximateWordsRule, (1,3)),

trainer = brill.FastBrillTaggerTrainer(raubt_tagger, templates)

Brill Tagging Accuracy



There’s certainly more you can do for part-of-speech tagging with nltk, but the braubt_tagger should be good enough for many purposes. The most important component of part-of-speech tagging is using the correct training data. If you want your tagger to be accurate, you need to train it on a corpus similar to the text you’ll be tagging. The brown, conll2000, and treebank corpora are what they are, and you shouldn’t assume that a tagger trained on them will be accurate on a different corpus. For example, a tagger trained on one part of the brown corpus may be 90% accurate on other parts of the brown corpus, but only 50% accurate on the conll2000 corpus. But a tagger trained on the conll2000 corpus will be accurate for the treebank corpus, and vice versa, because conll2000 and treebank are quite similar. So make sure you choose your training data carefully.

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Part of Speech Tagging with NLTK – Part 2

November 10, 2008 at 2:42 pm (python) (, , )

Following up on Part of Speech Tagging with NLTK – Part 1, I test the accuracy of adding an AffixTagger and a RegexpTagger to my SequentialBackoffTagger chain.

Affix Tagging

The AffixTagger learns prefix and suffix patterns to determine the part of speech tag for word. I tried inserting the AffixTagger into every possible position of the ubt_tagger to see which method increased accuracy the most. As you’ll see in the results, the aubt_tagger had the highest accuracy.


Regexp Tagging


word_patterns = [

aubtr_tagger = nltk.tag.RegexpTagger(word_patterns, backoff=aubt_tagger)

Affix and Regexp Tagging Accuracy


As you can see, the aubt_tagger provided the most gain over the ubt_tagger, and the raubt_tagger had a slight gain on top of that. In Part 3 I’ll discuss the results of using the BrillTagger to push the accuracy even higher.

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Part of Speech Tagging with NLTK – Part 1

November 3, 2008 at 6:19 pm (python) (, , )

An important part of weotta’s tag extraction is part of speech tagging, a process of identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech in context. NLTK provides the necessary tools for tagging, but doesn’t actually tell you what methods work best, so I decided to find out for myself.

Training and Test Sentences

NLTK has a data package that includes 3 tagged corpora: brown, conll2000, and treebank. I divided each of these corpora into 2 sets, the training set and the testing set. The choice and size of your training set can have a significant effect on the tagging accuracy, so for real world usage, you need to train on a corpus that is very representative of the actual text you want to tag. In particular, the brown corpus has a number of different categories, so choose your categories wisely. I chose these categories primarily because they have a higher occurance of the word food than other categories.

import nltk.corpus, nltk.tag, itertools
from nltk.tag import brill
brownc_sents = nltk.corpus.brown.tagged_sents(categories="c")
brownf_sents = nltk.corpus.brown.tagged_sents(categories="f")
brownp_sents = nltk.corpus.brown.tagged_sents(categories="p")

brown_train = list(itertools.chain(brownc_sents[:1000], brownf_sents[:1000], brownp_sents[:1000]))
brown_test = list(itertools.chain(brownc_sents[1000:2000], brownf_sents[1000:2000], brownp_sents[1000:2000]))

conll_sents = nltk.corpus.conll2000.tagged_sents()
conll_train = list(conll_sents[:4000])
conll_test = list(conll_sents[4000:8000])

treebank_sents = nltk.corpus.treebank.tagged_sents()
treebank_train = list(treebank_sents[:1500])
treebank_test = list(treebank_sents[1500:3000])

Ngram Tagging

I started by testing different combinations of the 3 NgramTaggers: UnigramTagger, BigramTagger, and TrigramTagger. These taggers inherit from SequentialBackoffTagger, which allows them to be chained together for greater accuracy. To save myself a little pain when constructing and training these taggers, I created a utility method for creating a chain of SequentialBackoffTaggers.

def backoff_tagger(tagged_sents, tagger_classes, backoff=None):
	if not backoff:
		backoff = tagger_classes[0](tagged_sents)
		del tagger_classes[0]

	for cls in tagger_classes:
		tagger = cls(tagged_sents, backoff=backoff)
		backoff = tagger

	return backoff

ubt_tagger = backoff_tagger(train_sents, [nltk.tag.UnigramTagger, nltk.tag.BigramTagger, nltk.tag.TrigramTagger])
utb_tagger = backoff_tagger(train_sents, [nltk.tag.UnigramTagger, nltk.tag.TrigramTagger, nltk.tag.BigramTagger])
but_tagger = backoff_tagger(train_sents, [nltk.tag.BigramTagger, nltk.tag.UnigramTagger, nltk.tag.TrigramTagger])
btu_tagger = backoff_tagger(train_sents, [nltk.tag.BigramTagger, nltk.tag.TrigramTagger, nltk.tag.UnigramTagger])
tub_tagger = backoff_tagger(train_sents, [nltk.tag.TrigramTagger, nltk.tag.UnigramTagger, nltk.tag.BigramTagger])
tbu_tagger = backoff_tagger(train_sents, [nltk.tag.TrigramTagger, nltk.tag.BigramTagger, nltk.tag.UnigramTagger])

Accuracy Testing

To test the accuracy of a tagger, we can compare it to the test sentences using the nltk.tag.accuracy function.

nltk.tag.accuracy(tagger, test_sents)

Ngram Tagging Accuracy

Ngram Tagging Accuracy

Ngram Tagging Accuracy


The ubt_tagger and utb_taggers are extremely close to each other, but the ubt_tagger is the slight favorite (note that the backoff sequence is in reverse order, so for the ubt_tagger, the TrigramTagger backsoff to the BigramTagger, which backsoff to the UnigramTagger.)

Update: in Part of Speech Tagging with NLTK – Part 2, I do further testing using the AffixTagger and the RegexpTagger to get the accuracy up past 80%.

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