How to auto-tag content, algorithms and suggestions needed

Question

I am working with some really large databases of newspaper articles, I have them in a MySQL database, and I can query them all.

I am now searching for ways to help me tag these articles with somewhat descriptive tags.

All these articles is accessible from a URL that looks like this:

http://web.site/CATEGORY/this-is-the-title-slug

So at least I can use the category to figure what type of content that we are working with. However, I also want to tag based on the article-text.

My initial approach was doing this:

1. Get all articles
2. Get all words, remove all punctuation, split by space, and count them by occurrence
3. Analyze them, and filter common non-descriptive words out like "them", "I", "this", "these", "their" etc.
4. When all the common words was filtered out, the only thing left is words that is tag-worthy.

But this turned out to be a rather manual task, and not a very pretty or helpful approach.

This also suffered from the problem of words or names that are split by space, for example if 1.000 articles contains the name "John Doe", and 1.000 articles contains the name of "John Hanson", I would only get the word "John" out of it, not his first name, and last name.

Rather

Relevant article: readwrite.com/2011/05/13/tagger – Iormina

Answer 1

Automatically tagging articles is really a research problem and you can spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel when others have already done much of the work. I'd advise using one of the existing natural language processing toolkits like NLTK.

To get started, I would suggest looking at implementing a proper Tokeniser (much better than splitting by whitespace), and then take a look at Chunking and Stemming algorithms.

You might also want to count frequencies for n-grams, i.e. a sequences of words, instead of individual words. This would take care of "words split by a space". Toolkits like NLTK have functions in-built for this.

Finally, as you iteratively improve your algorithm, you might want to train on a random subset of the database and then try how the algorithm tags the remaining set of articles to see how well it works.

Decreasing

This accepted answers is outdated and should be labelled as such. – Supple

Answer 2

You should use a metric such as tf-idf to get the tags out:

1. Count the frequency of each term per document. This is the term frequency, tf(t, D). The more often a term occurs in the document D, the more important it is for D.
2. Count, per term, the number of documents the term appears in. This is the document frequency, df(t). The higher df, the less the term discriminates among your documents and the less interesting it is.
3. Divide tf by the log of df: tfidf(t, D) = tf(t, D) / log(df(D) + 1).
4. For each document, declare the top k terms by their tf-idf score to be the tags for that document.

Various implementations of tf-idf are available; for Java and .NET, there's Lucene, for Python there's scikits.learn.

If you want to do better than this, use language models. That requires some knowledge of probability theory.

Akkadian

Answer 3

Take a look at Kea. It's an open source tool for extracting keyphrases from text documents.

Your problem has also been discussed many times at http://metaoptimize.com/qa:

• http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/1527/what-are-some-good-toolkits-to-get-lda-like-tagging-of-my-documents
• http://metaoptimize.com/qa/questions/1060/tag-analysis-for-document-recommendation

Particularism

Both links broken Error 522 – Maudmaude

Answer 4

If I understand your question correctly, you'd like to group the articles into similarity classes. For example, you might assign article 1 to 'Sports', article 2 to 'Politics', and so on. Or if your classes are much finer-grained, the same articles might be assigned to 'Dallas Mavericks' and 'GOP Presidential Race'.

This falls under the general category of 'clustering' algorithms. There are many possible choices of such algorithms, but this is an active area of research (meaning it is not a solved problem, and thus none of the algorithms are likely to perform quite as well as you'd like).

I'd recommend you look at Latent Direchlet Allocation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation) or 'LDA'. I don't have personal experience with any of the LDA implementations available, so I can't recommend a specific system (perhaps others more knowledgeable than I might be able to recommend a user-friendly implementation).

You might also consider the agglomerative clustering implementations available in LingPipe (see http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/demos/tutorial/cluster/read-me.html), although I suspect an LDA implementation might prove somewhat more reliable.

A couple questions to consider while you're looking at clustering systems:

• Do you want to allow fractional class membership - e.g. consider an article discussing the economic outlook and its potential effect on the presidential race; can that document belong partly to the 'economy' cluster and partly to the 'election' cluster? Some clustering algorithms allow partial class assignment and some do not

• Do you want to create a set of classes manually (i.e., list out 'economy', 'sports', ...), or do you prefer to learn the set of classes from the data? Manual class labels may require more supervision (manual intervention), but if you choose to learn from the data, the 'labels' will likely not be meaningful to a human (e.g., class 1, class 2, etc.), and even the contents of the classes may not be terribly informative. That is, the learning algorithm will find similarities and cluster documents it considers similar, but the resulting clusters may not match your idea of what a 'good' class should contain.

Dewittdewlap

Not as much clustering, I don't have any predefined keywords, the idea was to let it learn after I decided which words not to take in a blacklist. I will take a look at the LDA, thanks! – Rather

Answer 5

Your approach seems sensible and there are two ways you can improve the tagging.

1. Use a known list of keywords/phrases for your tagging and if the count of the instances of this word/phrase is greater than a threshold (probably based on the length of the article) then include the tag.
2. Use a part of speech tagging algorithm to help reduce the article into a sensible set of phrases and use a sensible method to extract tags out of this. Once you have the articles reduced using such an algorithm, you would be able to identify some good candidate words/phrases to use in your keyword/phrase list for method 1.

Physical

Answer 6

If the content is an image or video, please check out the following blog article:

http://scottge.net/2015/06/30/automatic-image-and-video-tagging/

There are basically two approaches to automatically extract keywords from images and videos.

1. Multiple Instance Learning (MIL)
2. Deep Neural Networks (DNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and the variants

In the above blog article, I list the latest research papers to illustrate the solutions. Some of them even include demo site and source code.

If the content is a large text document, please check out this blog article:

Best Key Phrase Extraction APIs in the Market http://scottge.net/2015/06/13/best-key-phrase-extraction-apis-in-the-market/

Thanks, Scott

Missie

Answer 7

Assuming you have pre-defined set of tags, you can use the Elasticsearch Percolator API like this answer suggests:

Elasticsearch - use a "tags" index to discover all tags in a given string

Rank

Answer 8

Are you talking about the name-entity recognition ? if so, Anupam Jain is right. it;s research problem with using deep learning & CRF. In 2017, the name-entity recognition problem is force on semi-surprise learning technology.

The below link is related ner of paper: http://ai2-website.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/semi-supervised-sequence.pdf

Also, The below link is key-phase extraction on twitter: http://jkx.fudan.edu.cn/~qzhang/paper/keyphrase.emnlp2016.pdf

Alkalify