How to separate two concatenaded words
I have a dataset to review and I want to process it using NLP techniques. I have done all the preprocessing steps (remove stopwords, ending, etc.). My problem is that there are some words that are related to each other and my function does not understand them. Here's an example:
Great services. I had a nicemeal and I love it a lot.
How can I fix it from nicemeal to nice food ?
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Peter Norvig has a good solution to the word segmentation problem you're having. In short, it uses a large dataset of word frequencies (and bigram) and some dynamic programs to split long strings of related words into their most likely segmentation.
Download the source and word rate zip file and adapt it to your use case. Below is the relevant bit for completeness.
def memo(f):
"Memoize function f."
table = {}
def fmemo(*args):
if args not in table:
table[args] = f(*args)
return table[args]
fmemo.memo = table
return fmemo
@memo
def segment(text):
"Return a list of words that is the best segmentation of text."
if not text: return []
candidates = ([first]+segment(rem) for first,rem in splits(text))
return max(candidates, key=Pwords)
def splits(text, L=20):
"Return a list of all possible (first, rem) pairs, len(first)<=L."
return [(text[:i+1], text[i+1:])
for i in range(min(len(text), L))]
def Pwords(words):
"The Naive Bayes probability of a sequence of words."
return product(Pw(w) for w in words)
#### Support functions (p. 224)
def product(nums):
"Return the product of a sequence of numbers."
return reduce(operator.mul, nums, 1)
class Pdist(dict):
"A probability distribution estimated from counts in datafile."
def __init__(self, data=[], N=None, missingfn=None):
for key,count in data:
self[key] = self.get(key, 0) + int(count)
self.N = float(N or sum(self.itervalues()))
self.missingfn = missingfn or (lambda k, N: 1./N)
def __call__(self, key):
if key in self: return self[key]/self.N
else: return self.missingfn(key, self.N)
def datafile(name, sep='\t'):
"Read key,value pairs from file."
for line in file(name):
yield line.split(sep)
def avoid_long_words(key, N):
"Estimate the probability of an unknown word."
return 10./(N * 10**len(key))
N = 1024908267229 ## Number of tokens
Pw = Pdist(datafile('count_1w.txt'), N, avoid_long_words)
You can also use the method segment2
as it uses bigrams and is much more accurate.
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