Tutorial:
Machine Learning Tools in Natural Language Processing

Introduction

Resource

For each tutorial session below, you will find links to the software and data you need, script files that detail command line usage, and (where appropriate) helper scripts.

NOTE: The text files next to the tool links assume you have downloaded and unzipped/untarred the relevant package. They walk you through installation on the computers in the SC lab we are using for the tutorial, and show a sample run. They are NOT executable: they are intended to give an example for you to follow (IYI, they were generated with the unix 'script' command, hence the suffix '.script'...).

• Session 1: Context Sensitive Spelling

  • sample text
  • sentence segmentation tool   (script: using the sentence splitter)
  • word splitter   (script: using the word splitter)
  • Part-of-Speech Tagger   (script: using the POS-tagger)
  • FEX   (script: using FEX (basic))
  • preprocessing test materials
  • SNoW
  • Context Sensitive Spelling materials
  • explanation of POS tags



• Session 2: Named Entity Tagging with FEX and SNoW

  • NE data (original form)
  • NE data (desired form)
  • Data reformatting script
  • NE Tagging: postprocessing   script: analyzing SNoW output
  • NE Tagging: new data tools   script: tagging new (raw) text
  • Shallow Parser (Read Only)   script: using the Shallow Parser
  • chunk-to-column script
  • Sample FEX script: NE Tagging



• Session 3

  • Learning Based Java
  • LBJ User's Manual
  • The LBJ POS Tagger
  • A toy context sensitive spelling corrector

• Miscellaneous resources

  More details about SNoW, including its many useful tuning parameters and support for inference, can be found in the comprehensive SNoW user manual.

  Fex's user manual is included in its distribution tarball. In addition to explaining FEX's scripting language and input formats, this manual gives details of other specialized FEX modes.

  The following resources demonstrate FEX's document mode, which is not covered in this tutorial.

  • Document Classification ppt pdf
  • Document Classifier Materials
  • Document Classifier Processed Data

Tutorial Slides

Under each session heading are links to slides in powerpoint and pdf formats. 
NOTE: some slides will not display correctly in pdf format.

The resources to accompany each session are provided further down the page.

• Session 1: Text Processing and Feature Extraction

  • Introduction; Preprocessing; Feature Extraction ppt
  • Multi-class Classification with SNoW ppt pdf



• Session 2: Applying FEX and SNoW to Named Entity Tagging

  • Candidate Selection and Feature Extraction: Named Entity Tagging ppt

• Session 3: Learning Based Java

  • The Basics: ppt pdf
  • In the resources section below, see the User's Manual and the README in the "toy context sensitive spelling corrector" for more info.