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spacy-cameltokenizer

The cameltokenizer package

cameltokenizer wraps part of the camel_tools library and extends it, to perform morphological tokenization downstream the standard spaCy tokenizer; cameltokenizer reconfigures itself, based on the kind of input it gets, in order to work ..

  • .. as a complete tokenizer, inside the training pipeline, by subclassing the standard Tokenizer class;
  • .. as an extension of the processing pipeline.

The use context of cameltokenizer

To support the Arabic language (MSA) inside the spaCy framework with a trained language model, which was missing when cameltokenizer has been developed, we devised a solution including two packages, besides the spaCy distribution:

  • the cameltokenizer package, which implements a tokenizer extension; it is written in Cython, in order to interface spaCy code also written in Cython;
  • a package named ar_core_news_md, similar to other similarly named language packages;

plus

  • some initialization code, which registers a pipeline component to be called first, so that it gets its input (a Doc), from the standard tokenizer;
  • a customization of the punctuation module and of init.py inside spacy.lang.ar.

How cameltokenizer works

The model training is based on the Universal Dependencies Arabic-PADT treebank. We "cleaned" it in some way, running the function ar_padt_fix_conllu, which is defined in the utils module; it

  • removes the Tatweel/Kashida character (it is only typographic stuff) and the Superscript Alef character from the sentences;
  • removes the vocalization diacritics from the sentences and from the tokens text, to improve the token alignment when running the spaCy debug data command; eventually, we removed them from the lemmas as well, thus obtaining some minor improvements;
  • "fixes" the splitting of a few composite particles, to avoid cases of "destructive" (non consevative) tokenization;
  • for the same reason, "fixes" the splitting of words starting with Lam-Lam sequence, removing the intermediate Alif inserted by the annotator.

We think that, without the morphological tokenization, no parsing would be possible at all. For that, we chose the MorphologicalTokenizer of CamelTools. It mainly looks for prefixed prepositions and suffixed pronouns, not declension and conjugation affixes. We apply to its input and its output, in a dirty and inefficient way, a lot of small "fixes" aimed at reducing the number of misaligned tokens, that is to better match the tokenization done by the annotators of the training set (the .conllu files); possibly, said fixes could result in some overfitting.

Some results

The use of cameltokenizer ha allowed us to drastically improve the results of the execution of the spacy commands debug data and train, over those obtained running them with the native tokenizer, even if the accuracy evaluated with the spaCy benchmark is not very good:

  • debug data - The percentage of misaligned tokens is slightly more than 1%; it was over 16% at the start, without the tokenizer extensions;
  • train - The overall best score in training a pipeline with tagger, trainable lemmatizer and parser is 0.88; it was 0.66 at the start;
  • benchmark accuracy - TOK 99.19 TAG 88.63 POS 94.09 MORPH 88.83 LEMMA 94.53 UAS 80.24 LAS 73.01 SENT P 60.60 SENT R 71.03 SENT F 65.40 SPEED 1607

Performances above are worse than the spaCy language models for most European languages. We won't discuss here why dealing with the Arabic language is more complex. Our intent is just to understand if those performances are acceptable in some text-analysis tasks; namely, in tasks related to linguistic education.

Some caveats

  • cameltokenizer is work in progress;
  • the time performance is poor; this is mainly due to the heavy task carried out by the MorphologicalTokenizer;
  • our code needs a lot of cleaning;
  • currently, we create manually the package ar_core_news_md inside the site-packages directory of a Python virtual environment and put inside it a symlink to the output/model-best directory produced by the training pipeline, which contains the individual trained models.

More information on the the problems encountered and on the motivations of some choices can be found in the discussion explosion/spaCy#7146