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SwiftRiver 2011 Overview | PDF
SWIFT RIVER 2011

  Jon Gosier, Director of Product
         http://swiftly.org

           @swiftriver
            @jongos



            An Ushahidi Initiative
Initial development began during the Haiti earthquakes,
one of Ushahidi’s largest deployments to date.

Objective became to offer smart tools for curating real-
time data of all types (Email, Twitter, SMS, Web feeds).
PLATFORM GOALS
‣ Democratize access to intelligence tools
‣ Structure unstructured data feeds
‣ Data-mine overwhelming realtime datasets
‣ Surface signal & suppress noise
‣ Identify and rate authoritative users &
 sources
‣ Easy to use tools & applications for curating
 data on the user’s terms
“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”
                                            - Clay Shirky
Sweeper - User Interface
The Brain as an API
 ‣ Breaks content (data) into pieces
 ‣ Analyzes pieces separately
 ‣ Conditionally prioritizes
 ‣ Learns from experience
 ‣ Processing is distributed
 ‣ Recombination of pieces
APIs                                          Applications
‣   Tagging API - parses text and adds taxonomy

‣   Location API - detects origin location of content        ‣   Sweeper - sweep, structure and sort
‣   Influence API - measures influence of content online           realtime data-streams

‣   Reputation API - stores information about user           ‣   SwiftMeme - meme/keyword tracker,

    behavior                                                     content discovery

‣   Duplication Filter API - receives feeds and filters out   ‣   SwiftMail - sort email by relevance

    duplicate content to cut down on retweets
Product (RED)
Queensland - ABC Australia Deployment
RIVER ID
Global Trust and Reputation Server




             Web Services
WHAT IS RIVER ID?
• Opt-in    product for Ushahidi deployments

• Collect   information on all contributors

• Use   contributions to build trust profile

• Use   trust profile to help validate information in the future

• Global    trust bank built on OAUTH standards
REVERBERATIONS
    Measuring Influence




         Web Services
INFORMATION REVERBERATES

• Good   information and Bad information spread the same

• Reverberations   tracks influences

• Breadcrumb   trails for information and content
AUTO-TAGGING
SILCC: SwiftRiver Language Computation Core




                 Web Services
WHAT IS SILCC?
•Swift Language Computation Component
•One of the SwiftRiver Web Services
•Open Web API
•Semantic Tagging of Short Text
•Natural Language Processing
•Multilingual
•Multiple sources (twitter, email, SMS, blogs etc)
•Active Learning capability
Swiftriver     SiLCC  Dataflow  
       
                          SiSLS  
                                                         Content   Items   coming   from   the   SiSLS   have      where  
                 Swiftriver  Source                      SiSLS   integrations   is   enabled      global   trust   values  
                  Library  Service                       added  to  the  object  model.  


            




                         SiLCC  

               Swiftriver  Language                      An  API  key  is  sent  along  with  the  text  to  ensure  that  
                                                         the  SiLCC  is  not  open  to  any  malicious  usage.    
               Computational  Core  

                  The  text  of  the  
               content  is  sent  to  the  
                       SiLCC.  



                                                         There  is  still  a  bit  of  ambiguity  around  what  the  NLP  
                                                         should  extract  from  the  text  but  at  its  most  simple,  
               Using  NLP,  the  SiLCC                   all  the  nouns  would  be  a  good  start.  
                extracts  Nouns  and  
               other  keywords  from  
                      the  text.  




               The  SiLCC  send  back  
                                                           The   lists   of   tags   sent   back   from   the   SiLCC   can   be  
               a  list  of  tags  that  are  
                                                           added  to  the  Content  Item  along  with  any  that  were  
                     added  to  the                        extracted  from  the  source  data  by  the  parser.  
                     Content  Item  




                          SLISa  
                                                           Although   the   NLP   tags   have   now   been   applied,   the  
                                                           SLISa   is   now   responsible   for   applying   instance  
                Swiftriver  Language  
                                                           specific  tagging  corrections.  
               Improvement  Service  

            
OUR GOALS
•Simple Tagging of short snippets of text
•Rapid tagging for high volume environments
•Simple API, easy to use
•Learns from user feedback
•Routing of messages to upstream services
•Semantic Classification
•Sorts rapid streams into buckets
•Clusters like messages
•Visual effects
•Cross-referencing
WHAT IT’S NOT
•Does not do deep analysis of text
•Only identifies words within original text
HOW DOES IT WORK?
•Step 1: Lexical Analysis
•Step 2: Parsing into constituent parts
•Step 3: Part of Speech tagging
•Step 4: Feature extraction
•Step 5: Compute using feature weights
•Lets examine each one in turn...
STEP 1: LEXICAL ANALYSIS
•For news headlines, email subjects this is trivial, just
 split on spaces.

•For Twitter this is more complex...
TWEET ANALYSIS
•Tweets are surprisingly complex
•Only 140 characters but many features
•Emergent features from community (e.g. hashtags)
•Lets take a look at a typical tweet...
TWEET ANALYSIS
 The typical Tweet: “RT @directrelief: RT
 @PIH: PBS @NewsHour addresses mental health
 needs in the aftermath of the #Haiti earthquake
 #health #earthquake... http://bit.ly/bNhyK6”

•RT indicates a “re-tweet”
•@name indicates who the original tweeter was
•Multiple embedded retweets
•Hashtags (e.g. #Haiti) can play two roles, as a tag
 and as part of the sentence
TWEET ANALYSIS 2
•Two or more hashtags within a tweet (e.g.
 #health and #earthquake)
•Continuation dots “...” indicates that there
 was more text that didn’t fit into the 140 limit
 somewhere in it’s history
•Urls many tweets contain one or more urls
 As we can see this simple tweet contains no less
 than 7 different features and that’s not all!
TWEET ANALYSIS 3
We want to break up the tweet into the following
parts:
{

  'text': ['PBS addresses mental health needs in the aftermath of the Haiti
earthquake'],

    'hashtags': ['#Haiti', '#health', '#earthquake'],

    'names': ['@directrelief', '@PIH', '@NewsHour'],

    'urls': ['http://bit.ly/bNhyK6'],

}
TWEET ANALYSIS 4
 Why do we want to break up the tweet into parts
 (parsing)?

•Because we want to further process the
 grammatically correct english text
•Part of speech tagging would otherwise be
 corrupted by words it cannot recognize (e.g. urls,
 hashtags, @names etc.)
•We want to save the hashtags for later use
•Many of the features are irrelevant to the task of
 identifying tags (e.g. dots, punctuation, @name, RT)
TWEET ANALYSIS 5
•We now take the “text” portion of the tweet and
 perform part of speech tagging on it
•After part of speech tagging, we perform feature
 extraction
•Features are now passed through the keyword
 classifier which returns a list of keywords / tags
•Finally we combine these tags with the hashtags we
 saved earlier to give the complete tag set
HEADLINE AND EMAIL
    SUBJECT ANALYSIS
•This is much simpler to do
•Its a subset of the steps in Tweet Analysis
•There is no parsing since there are no hashtags,
 @names etc.
FEATURE EXTRACTION
• For the active learning algorithm we need to extract features to use in classification
• These features should be subject/domain independent
• We therefore never use the actual words as features
• This would for example give artificially high weights to words such as “earthquake”
• We don't want these artificial weights as we can’t foresee future disasters and we
    want to be as generic with classification as possible
•   The use of training sets does allow for domain customization if where necessary
FEATURE EXTRACTION
• Capitalization of individual words: Either first caps, or all caps, this is an
    important indicator of proper nouns or other important words that make good tag
    candidates
•   Position in text: Tags seem to have a greater preponderance near the
    beginning of text
•   Part of Speech: Nouns and proper nouns are particularly important but so are
    some adjectives and adverbs
•   Capitalization of entire text: sometimes the whole text is capitalized and
    this should reduce overall weighting of other features
•   Length of the text: In shorter texts the words are more likely to be tags
•   The parts of speech of previous and next words (effectively this means we
    are using trigrams; or a window of 3)
TRAINING
• Requires user reviewed examples
• Lexical analysis, parsing and feature extraction on the examples
• Multinomial naïve Bayes algorithm
• NB: The granularity we are classifying is at the word level
• For each word in the text, we classify it as either a keyword or not
• This has pleasant side effect of providing several training examples from each user
    reviewed text
•   Even with less than 50 reviewed texts the results are comparable to the simple
    approach of using nouns only
ACTIVE LEARNING
•The API also provides a method for users to send
 back corrected text
•The corrected text is saved and then used in the
 next iteration of training
•User may optionally specify a corpus for the
 example to go into
•Training can be performed using any combination of
 corpora
DEVELOPER FRIENDLY
•Two levels of API, the web API and the internal
 Python API
•Either one may be used but most users will use the
 web API
•Design is highly modular and maintainable
•For very rapid backend processing the native Python
 API can be used
PYTHON CLASSES
Most of the classes that make up the library are
divided into three types:

   1) Tokenizers
   2) Parsers
   3) Taggers

All three types have consistent API's and are
interchangeable.
PYTHON API
•A tagger calls a parser
•A parser calls a tokenizer
•Output of the tokenizer goes into the parser
•Output of the parser goes into the tagger
•Output of the tagger goes into the user!
CLASSES
• BasicTokenizer – This is used for splitting basic (non-tweet) text into individual
    words
•   TweetTokenizer – This is used to tokenize a tweet, it may also be used to
    tokenize plain text since plain text is a subset of tweets
•   TweetParser – Calls the TweetTokenizer and the parses the output (see
    previous example)
•   TweetTagger – Calls the TweetTokenizer and then tags the output of the text
    part and adds the hashtags
•   BasicTagger – Calls the BasicTokenizer and then tags the text, should only be
    used for non-tweet text, uses simple Part of Speech to identify tags
•   BayesTagger – Same as BasicTagger but uses weights from the naïve Bayes
    training algorithm
DEPENDANCIES
•Part of speech tagging is currently performed by the
 Python NLTK
•The Web API uses the Pylons web framework
CURRENT STATUS
•Tag method of API is ready for use, individual
 deployments can choose between using the
 BasicTagger or the BayesTagger
•Tell method (for user feedback) will be ready by
 the time you read this!
•Training is possible on corpora of tagged data in .csv
 format (see examples in distribution)
CURRENT LIMITATIONS
•Only English text is supported at the moment
•Tags are always one of the words in the supplied
 text ie they can never be a word not in the supplied
 text
•Very few training examples exist at the moment
GEO DICT
LOCATION DISAMBIGUATION




        Web Services
WHAT IS GEO DICT?
• For   auto-mapping data

• Reverse   lookup lat/lon from place names

• Works    with data from Twitter, Email, RSS, SMS

• SVM    or Naive Bayes/Fisher Classification

• Database   of global place-names corresponding lat/lon
ITEM CLASSIFICATION
• Feature   Extraction: Bag of Words, String Kernels

• Higher   Level Features: Topic Modeling

• Linguistic   pre-processing: lemmatization, stemming

• Natural   Language Processing

• Named     Entity Recognition

• Multi-class   classification: One-vs.-One, One-vs.-All
SWIFT RIVER

Jon Gosier, Director of Product
       http://swiftly.org

         @swiftriver
          @jongos



          An Ushahidi Initiative

SwiftRiver 2011 Overview

  • 1.
    SWIFT RIVER 2011 Jon Gosier, Director of Product http://swiftly.org @swiftriver @jongos An Ushahidi Initiative
  • 2.
    Initial development beganduring the Haiti earthquakes, one of Ushahidi’s largest deployments to date. Objective became to offer smart tools for curating real- time data of all types (Email, Twitter, SMS, Web feeds).
  • 3.
    PLATFORM GOALS ‣ Democratizeaccess to intelligence tools ‣ Structure unstructured data feeds ‣ Data-mine overwhelming realtime datasets ‣ Surface signal & suppress noise ‣ Identify and rate authoritative users & sources ‣ Easy to use tools & applications for curating data on the user’s terms
  • 4.
    “It’s not informationoverload. It’s filter failure.” - Clay Shirky
  • 5.
    Sweeper - UserInterface
  • 6.
    The Brain asan API ‣ Breaks content (data) into pieces ‣ Analyzes pieces separately ‣ Conditionally prioritizes ‣ Learns from experience ‣ Processing is distributed ‣ Recombination of pieces
  • 7.
    APIs Applications ‣ Tagging API - parses text and adds taxonomy ‣ Location API - detects origin location of content ‣ Sweeper - sweep, structure and sort ‣ Influence API - measures influence of content online realtime data-streams ‣ Reputation API - stores information about user ‣ SwiftMeme - meme/keyword tracker, behavior content discovery ‣ Duplication Filter API - receives feeds and filters out ‣ SwiftMail - sort email by relevance duplicate content to cut down on retweets
  • 10.
  • 11.
    Queensland - ABCAustralia Deployment
  • 12.
    RIVER ID Global Trustand Reputation Server Web Services
  • 13.
    WHAT IS RIVERID? • Opt-in product for Ushahidi deployments • Collect information on all contributors • Use contributions to build trust profile • Use trust profile to help validate information in the future • Global trust bank built on OAUTH standards
  • 15.
    REVERBERATIONS Measuring Influence Web Services
  • 16.
    INFORMATION REVERBERATES • Good information and Bad information spread the same • Reverberations tracks influences • Breadcrumb trails for information and content
  • 20.
    AUTO-TAGGING SILCC: SwiftRiver LanguageComputation Core Web Services
  • 21.
    WHAT IS SILCC? •SwiftLanguage Computation Component •One of the SwiftRiver Web Services •Open Web API •Semantic Tagging of Short Text •Natural Language Processing •Multilingual •Multiple sources (twitter, email, SMS, blogs etc) •Active Learning capability
  • 22.
    Swiftriver    SiLCC  Dataflow     SiSLS   Content   Items   coming   from   the   SiSLS   have     where   Swiftriver  Source     SiSLS   integrations   is   enabled     global   trust   values   Library  Service   added  to  the  object  model.     SiLCC   Swiftriver  Language   An  API  key  is  sent  along  with  the  text  to  ensure  that   the  SiLCC  is  not  open  to  any  malicious  usage.     Computational  Core     The  text  of  the   content  is  sent  to  the   SiLCC.   There  is  still  a  bit  of  ambiguity  around  what  the  NLP   should  extract  from  the  text  but  at  its  most  simple,   Using  NLP,  the  SiLCC   all  the  nouns  would  be  a  good  start.   extracts  Nouns  and   other  keywords  from   the  text.   The  SiLCC  send  back   The   lists   of   tags   sent   back   from   the   SiLCC   can   be   a  list  of  tags  that  are   added  to  the  Content  Item  along  with  any  that  were   added  to  the   extracted  from  the  source  data  by  the  parser.   Content  Item   SLISa   Although   the   NLP   tags   have   now   been   applied,   the   SLISa   is   now   responsible   for   applying   instance   Swiftriver  Language   specific  tagging  corrections.   Improvement  Service    
  • 23.
    OUR GOALS •Simple Taggingof short snippets of text •Rapid tagging for high volume environments •Simple API, easy to use •Learns from user feedback •Routing of messages to upstream services •Semantic Classification •Sorts rapid streams into buckets •Clusters like messages •Visual effects •Cross-referencing
  • 24.
    WHAT IT’S NOT •Doesnot do deep analysis of text •Only identifies words within original text
  • 25.
    HOW DOES ITWORK? •Step 1: Lexical Analysis •Step 2: Parsing into constituent parts •Step 3: Part of Speech tagging •Step 4: Feature extraction •Step 5: Compute using feature weights •Lets examine each one in turn...
  • 26.
    STEP 1: LEXICALANALYSIS •For news headlines, email subjects this is trivial, just split on spaces. •For Twitter this is more complex...
  • 27.
    TWEET ANALYSIS •Tweets aresurprisingly complex •Only 140 characters but many features •Emergent features from community (e.g. hashtags) •Lets take a look at a typical tweet...
  • 28.
    TWEET ANALYSIS Thetypical Tweet: “RT @directrelief: RT @PIH: PBS @NewsHour addresses mental health needs in the aftermath of the #Haiti earthquake #health #earthquake... http://bit.ly/bNhyK6” •RT indicates a “re-tweet” •@name indicates who the original tweeter was •Multiple embedded retweets •Hashtags (e.g. #Haiti) can play two roles, as a tag and as part of the sentence
  • 29.
    TWEET ANALYSIS 2 •Twoor more hashtags within a tweet (e.g. #health and #earthquake) •Continuation dots “...” indicates that there was more text that didn’t fit into the 140 limit somewhere in it’s history •Urls many tweets contain one or more urls As we can see this simple tweet contains no less than 7 different features and that’s not all!
  • 30.
    TWEET ANALYSIS 3 Wewant to break up the tweet into the following parts: { 'text': ['PBS addresses mental health needs in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake'], 'hashtags': ['#Haiti', '#health', '#earthquake'], 'names': ['@directrelief', '@PIH', '@NewsHour'], 'urls': ['http://bit.ly/bNhyK6'], }
  • 31.
    TWEET ANALYSIS 4 Why do we want to break up the tweet into parts (parsing)? •Because we want to further process the grammatically correct english text •Part of speech tagging would otherwise be corrupted by words it cannot recognize (e.g. urls, hashtags, @names etc.) •We want to save the hashtags for later use •Many of the features are irrelevant to the task of identifying tags (e.g. dots, punctuation, @name, RT)
  • 32.
    TWEET ANALYSIS 5 •Wenow take the “text” portion of the tweet and perform part of speech tagging on it •After part of speech tagging, we perform feature extraction •Features are now passed through the keyword classifier which returns a list of keywords / tags •Finally we combine these tags with the hashtags we saved earlier to give the complete tag set
  • 33.
    HEADLINE AND EMAIL SUBJECT ANALYSIS •This is much simpler to do •Its a subset of the steps in Tweet Analysis •There is no parsing since there are no hashtags, @names etc.
  • 34.
    FEATURE EXTRACTION • Forthe active learning algorithm we need to extract features to use in classification • These features should be subject/domain independent • We therefore never use the actual words as features • This would for example give artificially high weights to words such as “earthquake” • We don't want these artificial weights as we can’t foresee future disasters and we want to be as generic with classification as possible • The use of training sets does allow for domain customization if where necessary
  • 35.
    FEATURE EXTRACTION • Capitalizationof individual words: Either first caps, or all caps, this is an important indicator of proper nouns or other important words that make good tag candidates • Position in text: Tags seem to have a greater preponderance near the beginning of text • Part of Speech: Nouns and proper nouns are particularly important but so are some adjectives and adverbs • Capitalization of entire text: sometimes the whole text is capitalized and this should reduce overall weighting of other features • Length of the text: In shorter texts the words are more likely to be tags • The parts of speech of previous and next words (effectively this means we are using trigrams; or a window of 3)
  • 36.
    TRAINING • Requires userreviewed examples • Lexical analysis, parsing and feature extraction on the examples • Multinomial naïve Bayes algorithm • NB: The granularity we are classifying is at the word level • For each word in the text, we classify it as either a keyword or not • This has pleasant side effect of providing several training examples from each user reviewed text • Even with less than 50 reviewed texts the results are comparable to the simple approach of using nouns only
  • 37.
    ACTIVE LEARNING •The APIalso provides a method for users to send back corrected text •The corrected text is saved and then used in the next iteration of training •User may optionally specify a corpus for the example to go into •Training can be performed using any combination of corpora
  • 38.
    DEVELOPER FRIENDLY •Two levelsof API, the web API and the internal Python API •Either one may be used but most users will use the web API •Design is highly modular and maintainable •For very rapid backend processing the native Python API can be used
  • 39.
    PYTHON CLASSES Most ofthe classes that make up the library are divided into three types: 1) Tokenizers 2) Parsers 3) Taggers All three types have consistent API's and are interchangeable.
  • 40.
    PYTHON API •A taggercalls a parser •A parser calls a tokenizer •Output of the tokenizer goes into the parser •Output of the parser goes into the tagger •Output of the tagger goes into the user!
  • 41.
    CLASSES • BasicTokenizer –This is used for splitting basic (non-tweet) text into individual words • TweetTokenizer – This is used to tokenize a tweet, it may also be used to tokenize plain text since plain text is a subset of tweets • TweetParser – Calls the TweetTokenizer and the parses the output (see previous example) • TweetTagger – Calls the TweetTokenizer and then tags the output of the text part and adds the hashtags • BasicTagger – Calls the BasicTokenizer and then tags the text, should only be used for non-tweet text, uses simple Part of Speech to identify tags • BayesTagger – Same as BasicTagger but uses weights from the naïve Bayes training algorithm
  • 42.
    DEPENDANCIES •Part of speechtagging is currently performed by the Python NLTK •The Web API uses the Pylons web framework
  • 43.
    CURRENT STATUS •Tag methodof API is ready for use, individual deployments can choose between using the BasicTagger or the BayesTagger •Tell method (for user feedback) will be ready by the time you read this! •Training is possible on corpora of tagged data in .csv format (see examples in distribution)
  • 44.
    CURRENT LIMITATIONS •Only Englishtext is supported at the moment •Tags are always one of the words in the supplied text ie they can never be a word not in the supplied text •Very few training examples exist at the moment
  • 45.
  • 46.
    WHAT IS GEODICT? • For auto-mapping data • Reverse lookup lat/lon from place names • Works with data from Twitter, Email, RSS, SMS • SVM or Naive Bayes/Fisher Classification • Database of global place-names corresponding lat/lon
  • 47.
    ITEM CLASSIFICATION • Feature Extraction: Bag of Words, String Kernels • Higher Level Features: Topic Modeling • Linguistic pre-processing: lemmatization, stemming • Natural Language Processing • Named Entity Recognition • Multi-class classification: One-vs.-One, One-vs.-All
  • 48.
    SWIFT RIVER Jon Gosier,Director of Product http://swiftly.org @swiftriver @jongos An Ushahidi Initiative