This is also on Phab[0] for longer-term documentation, but I'm copying it
here for wider distribution.
—Trey
*TextCat and Language Detection*
Back before the holidays (12/23/2015), Stas and Trey had a conversation on
IRC about TextCat and Lang ID. There was lots of good stuff in the
conversation, so the main points are summarized here, to record for
posterity, and to open them up to further conversation if anyone has any
additional ideas.
For reference, the main Phab ticket for language ID stuff is T118278: EPIC:
Improve Language Identification for use in Cirrus Search[1]
*Building Language Models:* It seems like we should try to create language
models to cover at least the same set of languages as the original TextCat.
The original models were in various encodings, but we’d create (and have
created) models in Unicode. In general, we saw better performance doing
language detection on queries using models built on queries.[2] If we want
to support general language identification, we could also build models
based on text from Wikipedia (which we need to do for some languages anyway
because the query data is so poor).[3] It’s a relatively straightforward
task, compared to getting sufficiently high quality query data.[4]
*Using Language Models:* We get the biggest improvement in language
detection accuracy (~20% increase in F0.5) from restricting the list of
candidate languages based on their individual performance and the
distribution of languages we encounter in real life, rather than using all
available languages.[2][7] We need our new TextCat to support the ability
to specify which models to use.[5] It makes sense to create models based on
both query data (if we have it) and general text (from Wikipedia) and make
them available, probably through Stas’s PHP version of TextCat on
GitHub.[6] Trey will also be putting the Perl version and language models
up on GitHub after a bit more cleanup.
*Choosing Language Models:* In order to choose which models to use on a
particular wiki, we need to sample queries and manually identify the
languages represented, and then experimentally determine the best set of
language models to use.[8] We will do this for the wikis with the highest
query volume, and see how far down the list we have time to work on. For
any wikis we don’t get to, we can try using a generic set of languages, or
just not do language detection for now, or make general capabilities
available as an opt-in feature—though we need to think more carefully about
how to handle smaller wikis, especially after we have more experience using
TextCat on larger wikis.
In addition to evaluation sets for particular wikis, we’re have a task[9]
to create a “balanced” set of queries in known languages for top wikis (by
query volume) for general evaluation of language models, which can help us
determine a generic set of more-or-less reliable languages. (These are
smaller sets that let us gauge general performance, but not enough for
training language models.)
*Updating Language Model Choices: *Trey’s estimate/intuition (which could
use some validation) is that the per-wiki language lists would need
updating at most once a quarter, though it’s possible that with appropriate
metrics we could determine that we needed to do an update by a sudden or
sustained gradual decrease in performance. We may need to think this
through a bit more carefully, since different update pattern imply
different places/ways to store the list of relevant language models. Stas
says that quarterly updates are close enough to static to put language
lists into some file in the Cirrus source, pretty much like we do with
indexing profiles, etc. Alternatively, if updates are more frequent and
per-wiki, we could store the list of languages to use in mediawiki-config.
[0]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118278#1919183
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118278
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Language_Detection_w…
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Language_Detection_with_TextCat>
[3]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121545
[4]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121547, etc. See [1] for more.
[5]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121538
[6]
https://github.com/smalyshev/textcat
[7]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Language_Detection_E…
[8]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121541
[9]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T121539
Trey Jones
Software Engineer, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 1:27 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Hi!
What’s the overhead for having the n-grams in an
external file? That
makes it easy to update them and keep them under version control. I
don’t have strong opinions about using a simple tab- or comma-separated
format vs in PHP array format like you have. Either is easy enough to
work with (though tab-separated would mean they could be swapped between
versions easily).
I chose PHP format mainly because it's the fastest way to get data into
PHP. Converting between TSV and PHP is very easy - lm2php tool converts
one way and the other way if we ever want it is similarly trivial.
I have built additional language models beyond the
ones you have put in
GitHub[1], but I’m not sure about their quality. Some I know are not
great, others are just hard (confusing Romance languages on short
strings isn’t surprising), but we don’t yet have general test data for
evaluating them, so I only shared the ones that aren’t completely
horrible on enwiki query data.
I think we need to think of some way of keeping these modules around
that aren't in the source of TextCat, and would be easily modifiable if
we want to experiment with them. Not sure yet what is the right place
for that.
My other big concern is testing,[2] to make sure that
everything works
as expected compared to the reference implementation in Perl. We should
build some models—training data is queries, which is treated as PII, so
it’s on stats1002 but not publicly available. I still need to clean up
over there and put it in a standard place.[3] We should run some IDs and
I think for this the textcat repo is the good place. I've already
started doing some unit tests there, and we can have the "standard"
models and maybe some example queries there. Right now unit tests check
that the model identifies the lines from the original file as their
original language. We may add more tests like that.
P.S.: Since the holidays are coming up pretty quick
and not much will
get done through the end of the year, we should plan some time to hack
on this while I'm in SF in January.
Surely. I will also start working on bringing this into the wikimedia
framework - making the repo on gerrit, cleaning it up for security
review, testing integration with Cirrus, etc.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org
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