Category: text mining

Wordle with NLP for Data Scientists

Wordle with NLP for Data Scientists

I have played my fair share of Wordle.

I’m not necessarily good at it, but most days I get to solve the puzzle.

The experience is completely different with Semantle — a Wordle-inspired puzzle in which you also need to guess the word of the day.

Unlike in Wordle, Semantle gives you unlimited guesses though. And, boy, you will need many!

Like Wordle, Semantle gives you hints as to how close your guesses were to the secret word of the day.

However, where Wordle shows you how good your guesses were in terms of the letters used, Semantle evaluates the semantic similarity of your guesses to the secret word. For the 1000 most similar words to the secret word, it will show you its closeness like in the picture above.

This semantic similarity comes from the domain of Natural Language Processing — NLP — and this basically reflects how often words are used in similar contexts in natural language.

For instance, the words “love” and “hate” may seem like opposites, but they will often score similarly in grammatical sentences. According to the semantle FAQ the actual opposite of “love” is probably something like “Arizona Diamondbacks”, or “carburetor”.

Another example is last day’s solution (15 March 2022), when the secret word was circle. The ten closest words you could have guessed include circles and semicircle, but more distinctive words such as corner and clockwise.

Further downfield you could have guessed relatively close words like saucer, dot, parabola, but I would not have expected words like outwaited, weaved, and zipped.

The creator of Semantle scored the semantic similarity for almost all words used in the English language, by training a so-called word2vec model based on a very large dataset of news articles (GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin from late 2021).

Now, every day, one word is randomly selected as the secret word, and you can try to guess which one it is. I usually give up after 300 to 400 guesses, but my record was 76 guesses for uncovering the secret word world.

Try it out yourself: https://semantle.novalis.org/

And do share your epic wins and fails!

Curated Regular Expression Resources

Curated Regular Expression Resources

Regular expression (also abbreviated to regex) really is a powertool any programmer should know. It was and is one of the things I most liked learning, as it provides you with immediate, godlike powers that can speed up your (data science) workflow tenfold.

I’ve covered many regex related topics on this blog already, but thought I’d combine them and others in a nice curated overview — for myself, and for you of course, to use.

If you have any materials you liked, but are missing, please let me know!

Contents

Introduction & Learning

Reading

Tutorials (interactive)

Video

Corey Shafer

The Coding Train

Language-specific

Python

Corey Shafer

R

Roger Peng

Testing & Debugging

debuggex.com

regex101.com

regextester.com | regexpal.com

regexr.com

ExtendsClass.com/regex-tester

rubular.com

pythex.com

Fun

Building a realistic Reddit AI that get upvoted in Python

Building a realistic Reddit AI that get upvoted in Python

Sometimes I find these AI / programming hobby projects that I just wished I had thought of…

Will Stedden combined OpenAI’s GPT-2 deep learning text generation model with another deep-learning language model by Google called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and created an elaborate architecture that had one purpose: posting the best replies on Reddit.

The architecture is shown at the end of this post — copied from Will’s original blog here. Moreover, you can read this post for details regarding the construction of the system. But let me see whether I can explain you what it does in simple language.

The below is what a Reddit comment and reply thread looks like. We have str8cokane making a comment to an original post (not in the picture), and then tupperware-party making a reply to that comment, followed by another reply by str8cokane. Basically, Will wanted to create an AI/bot that could write replies like tupperware-party that real people like str8cokane would not be able to distinguish from “real-people” replies.

Note that with 4 points, str8cokane‘s original comments was “liked” more than tupperware-party‘s reply and str8cokane‘s next reply, which were only upvoted 2 and 1 times respectively.

gpt2-bert on China
Example reddit comment and replies (via bonkerfield.org/)

So here’s what the final architecture looks like, and my attempt to explain it to you.

  1. Basically, we start in the upper left corner, where Will uses a database (i.e. corpus) of Reddit comments and replies to fine-tune a standard, pretrained GPT-2 model to get it to be good at generating (red: “fake”) realistic Reddit replies.
  2. Next, in the upper middle section, these fake replies are piped into a standard, pretrained BERT model, along with the original, real Reddit comments and replies. This way the BERT model sees both real and fake comments and replies. Now, our goal is to make replies that are undistinguishable from real replies. Hence, this is the task the BERT model gets. And we keep fine-tuning the original GPT-2 generator until the BERT discriminator that follows is no longer able to distinguish fake from real replies. Then the generator is “fooling” the discriminator, and we know we are generating fake replies that look like real ones!
    You can find more information about such generative adversarial networks here.
  3. Next, in the top right corner, we fine-tune another BERT model. This time we give it the original Reddit comments and replies along with the amount of times they were upvoted (i.e. sort of like likes on facebook/twitter). Basically, we train a BERT model to predict for a given reply, how much likes it is going to get.
  4. Finally, we can go to production in the lower lane. We give a real-life comment to the GPT-2 generator we trained in the upper left corner, which produces several fake replies for us. These candidates we run through the BERT discriminator we trained in the upper middle section, which determined which of the fake replies we generated look most real. Those fake but realistic replies are then input into our trained BERT model of the top right corner, which predicts for every fake but realistic reply the amount of likes/upvotes it is going to get. Finally, we pick and reply with the fake but realistic reply that is predicted to get the most upvotes!
What Will’s final architecture, combining GPT-2 and BERT, looked like (via bonkerfield.org)

The results are astonishing! Will’s bot sounds like a real youngster internet troll! Do have a look at the original blog, but here are some examples. Note that tupperware-party — the Reddit user from the above example — is actually Will’s AI.

COMMENT: 'Dune’s fandom is old and intense, and a rich thread in the cultural fabric of the internet generation' BOT_REPLY:'Dune’s fandom is overgrown, underfunded, and in many ways, a poor fit for the new, faster internet generation.'
bot responds to specific numerical bullet point in source comment

Will ends his blog with a link to the tutorial if you want to build such a bot yourself. Have a try!

Moreover, he also notes the ethical concerns:

I know there are definitely some ethical considerations when creating something like this. The reason I’m presenting it is because I actually think it is better for more people to know about and be able to grapple with this kind of technology. If just a few people know about the capacity of these machines, then it is more likely that those small groups of people can abuse their advantage.

I also think that this technology is going to change the way we think about what’s important about being human. After all, if a computer can effectively automate the paper-pushing jobs we’ve constructed and all the bullshit we create on the internet to distract us, then maybe it’ll be time for us to move on to something more meaningful.

If you think what I’ve done is a problem feel free to email me , or publically shame me on Twitter.

Will Stedden via bonkerfield.org/2020/02/combining-gpt-2-and-bert/

What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Encodings

What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Encodings

Kunststube wrote this great introduction to text encoding. Ever wondered why your Word document sometimes starts with ÉGÉìÉRÅ[ÉfÉBÉìÉOÇÕìÔǵÇ≠ǻǢ? Well, encoding‘s why. Kunststube introduces you to the wonderful world of ASCII, WLatin, Mac Latin, and UTF-8, -16 and -32.

Read the original articla via http://kunststube.net/encoding/

Chatterplots

Chatterplots

I’ve mentioned before that I dislike wordclouds (for instance here, or here) and apparently others share that sentiment. In his recent Medium blog, Daniel McNichol goes as far as to refer to the wordcloud as the pie chart of text data! Among others, Daniel calls wordclouds disorienting, one-dimensional, arbitrary and opaque and he mentions their lack of order, information, and scale. 

Wordcloud of the negative characteristics of wordclouds, via Medium

Instead of using wordclouds, Daniel suggests we revert to alternative approaches. For instance, in their Tidy Text Mining with R book, Julia Silge and David Robinson suggest using bar charts or network graphs, providing the necessary R code. Another alternative is provided in Daniel’s blog: the chatterplot!

While Daniel didn’t invent this unorthodox wordcloud-like plot, he might have been the first to name it a chatterplot. Daniel’s chatterplot uses a full x/y cartesian plane, turning the usually only arbitrary though exploratory wordcloud into a more quantitatively sound, information-rich visualization.

R package ggplot’s geom_text() function — or alternatively ggrepel‘s geom_text_repel() for better legibility — is perfectly suited for making a chatterplot. And interesting features/variables for the axis — apart from the regular word frequencies — can be easily computed using the R tidytext package. 

Here’s an example generated by Daniel, plotting words simulatenously by their frequency of occurance in comments to Hacker News articles (y-axis) as well as by the respective popularity of the comments the word was used in (log of the ranking, on the x-axis).

[CHATTERPLOTs are] like a wordcloud, except there’s actual quantitative logic to the order, placement & aesthetic aspects of the elements, along with an explicit scale reference for each. This allows us to represent more, multidimensional information in the plot, & provides the viewer with a coherent visual logic& direction by which to explore the data.

Daniel McNichol via Medium

I highly recommend the use of these chatterplots over their less-informative wordcloud counterpart, and strongly suggest you read Daniel’s original blog, in which you can also find the R code for the above visualizations.

Identifying “Dirty” Twitter Bots with R and Python

Past week, I came across two programming initiatives to uncover Twitter bots and one attempt to identify fake Instagram accounts.

Mike Kearney developed the R package botornot which applies machine learning to estimate the probability that a Twitter user is a bot. His default model is a gradient boosted model trained using both users-level (bio, location, number of followers and friends, etc.) and tweets-level information (number of hashtags, mentions, capital letters, etc.). This model is 93.53% accurate when classifying bots and 95.32% accurate when classifying non-bots. His faster model uses only the user-level data and is 91.78% accurate when classifying bots and 92.61% accurate when classifying non-bots. Unfortunately, the models did not classify my account correctly (see below), but you should definitely test yourself and your friends via this Shiny application.

Fun fact: botornot can be integrated with Mike’s rtweet package

Scraping Dirty Bots

At around the same time, I read this very interesting blog by Andy Patel. Annoyed by the fake Twitter accounts that kept liking and sharing his tweets, Andy wrote a Python script called pronbot_search. It’s an iterative search algorithm which Andy seeded with the dozen fake Twitter accounts that he identified originally. Subsequently, the program iterated over the friends and followers of each of these fake users, looking for other accounts displaying similar traits (e.g., similar description, including an URL to a sex-website called “Dirty Tinder”).

Whenever a new account was discovered, it was added to the query list, and the process continued. Because of the Twitter API restrictions, the whole crawling process took literal days before Andy manually terminated it. The results are just amazing:

After a day, the results looked like so. Notice the weird clusters of relationships in this network. [original]
The full bot network uncovered by Andy included 22.000 fake Twitter accounts:

At the end of the weekend of March 10th, Andy had to stop the scraper after running for several days even though he had only processed 18% of the networks of the 22.000 included Twitter bots [original]
The bot network on Twitter is probably enormous! Zooming in on the network, Andy notes that:

Pretty much the same pattern I’d seen after one day of crawling still existed after one week. Just a few of the clusters weren’t “flower” shaped.

Andy Patel, March 2018, link

Zoomed in to a specific part of the network you can see the separate clusters of bots doing little more than liking each others messages. [original]
In his blog, Andy continues to look at all kind of data on these fake accounts. I found most striking that many of these account are years and years old already. Potentially, Twitter can use Mike Kearney’s botornot application to spot and remove them!

Most of the bots in the Dirty Tinder network found by Andy Patel were 3 to 8 years old already. [original]
Andy was nice enough to share the data on these bot accounts here, for you to play with. His Python code is stored in the same github repo and more details around this project you can read in his original blog.

Fake Instagram Accounts

Finally, SRFdata (Timo Grossenbacher) attempted to uncover fake Instagram followers among the 7 million followers in the network of 115 important Swiss Instagram influencers in R. Magi Metrics was used to retrieve information for public Instagram accounts and rvest for private accounts. Next, clear fake accounts (e.g., little followers, following many, no posts, no profile picture, numbers in name) were labelled manually, and approximately 10% of the inspected 1000 accounts appeared fake. Finally, they trained a random forest model to classify fake accounts with a sensitivity (true negative) rate of 77.4% and an overall accuracy of around 94%.