Category: NLP

How to debug and test your regular expression (regex)

Regular expressions are such an incredibly convenient tool, available across so many languages that most developers will learn them sooner or later.

But regular expressions can become quite complex. The syntax is terse, subtle, and subject to combinatorial explosion.

The best way to improve your skills is to write a regular expression, test it on some real data, debug the expression, improve it and repeat this process again and again.

This is why regex101 (https://regex101.com/) is such a great tool.

Not only does it let you test out your regexes on a sample set, color coding your match groups:

But it also gives you a full explanation of what’s going on under the hood.

You can review the match information:

And even choose your favorite flavor (PHP, JavaScript, Python or Golan)

The Secret Recipe Behind GO-FOOD’s Recommendations (PyData Meetup)

The December PyData Meetup started with Luis Smith, Data Scientist at GO-JEK, sharing the Secret Recipe Behind GO-FOOD’s Recommendations:

“For GO-FOOD, we believe the key to unlocking good recommendations is to derive vector representations for our users, dishes, and merchants. This way we are able to capture our users’ food preferences and recommend them the most relevant merchants and dishes.”

How do people think about the food?

  • Flavor profile
  • Trendy
  • Value for money
  • Portion size
  • Ingredients

… and much more

The preferred approach is to let the transactional data discover the pattern.

A sample ETL workflow:

Using StarSpace to learn the vector representations:

Go-Jek formulation of the problem:

User-to-dish similarity is surfaced in the app via the “dishes you might like”. The average vector of customer’s purchases represents the recommended dish.

Due to data sparsity, item-based collaborative filtering is used for merchant recommendation.

The cold start problem is still an issue, for inactive users or users that purchase infrequently.

(published here)

Highlights of the 2018 Singapore Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SSNLP)

What a great symposium! Thank you Dr. Linlin Li, Prof. Ido Dagan, Prof. Noah Smith and the rest of the speakers for the interesting talks and thank you Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) for hosting this event. Here is a quick summary of the first half of the symposium, you can learn more by looking for the papers published by these research groups:

Linlin Li: The text processing engine that powers Alibaba’s business applications

Dr. Linlin Li from Alibaba presented the mission of Alibaba’s NLP group and spoke about AliNLP, a large scale NLP technology platform for the entire Alibaba Eco-system, dealing with data collection and multilingual algorithms for lexical, syntactic, semantic, discourse analysis and distributed representation of text.

Alibaba is also helping to improve the quality of the Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) in China, traditionally done by labour intensive methods.

Ido Dagan: Consolidating Textual Information

Prof. Ido Dagan gave an excellent presentation on Natural Knowledge Consolidating Textual Information. Texts come in large multitudes, such as news story, search results, and product reviews. Search interfaces hasn’t changed much in decades, which make them accessible, but hard to consume. For example, the news tweets illustration in the slide below shows that here is a lot of redundancy and complementary information, so there is a need to consolidate the knowledge within multiple texts.

Generic knowledge representation via structured knowledge graphs and semantic representation are often being used, where both approaches require an expert to annotate the dataset, which is expansive and hard to replicate.

The structure of a single sentence will look like this:

The information can be consolidated across the various data sources via Coreference

To conclude

Noah A. Smith: Syncretizing Structured and Learned Representation

Prof. Noah described new ways to use representation learning for NLP

Some promising results

Prof. Noah presented different approaches to solve backpropagation with structure in the middle, where the intermediate representation is non-differentiable.

See you all the the next conference!