The present invention relates generally to computer-based linguistic processing and specifically to methods for resolving which of a number of meanings of a given word in a text is likely to be the correct one, particularly in morphologically-rich languages such as Hebrew.
With the explosive growth in the volume of available on-line information, the efficiency of information retrieval (IR) systems becomes increasingly important. IR systems generally operate on a canonical representation of documents, called a “profile,” consisting of a list of indexing units. For text searching, the indexing units are typically words. The profiles are stored in an inverted index, enabling documents to be retrieved by matching the terms in a query phrase to the words in the index. Many IR applications have been developed. One example is the GURU system described by Maarek et al., in an article entitled “An Information Retrieval Approach for Automatically Constructing Software Libraries,” in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 17(8), pages 800–813 (August, 1991), which is incorporated herein by reference.
For efficient and thorough searching, it is desirable that variants of a given word, such as singular and plural forms of a noun, or different tenses of a verb, be mapped to the same indexing unit. In other words, a lexical analysis of the words should be invoked so that, ideally, all of them are represented by the same base word. The simplest tool for lexical analysis is a stemmer, which derives base words using ad hoc rules for stripping suffices and handling exceptional word forms. A more precise method is morphological analysis, using a dictionary and a set of declination rules to find the lexical base forms of the words in the document. The base form of a given word is referred to as its “lemma.”
English language morphology is simple enough so that even stemmers do an adequate job of analysis for most applications. Hebrew, however, like other Semitic languages, is highly synthetic and rich in variants. In standard Hebrew writing, not all of the vowels are represented, while several letters may represent either a vowel or a consonant. A given lexical root may be declined by insertion, deletion, substitution or affixation of letters. It is often difficult to determine which letters in a word belong to the lemma, and which have been added. For example, the Hebrew word mishtara can be analyzed correctly as any of:
The result of this complex morphology is a high level of ambiguity, which cannot be resolved unequivocally without contextual information. Therefore, Hebrew morphological analyzers typically return multiple possible analyses for a given word. An example of a morphological analyzer with Hebrew capabilities is the POE LanguageWare system (version 2.6), offered by the IBM Software Solutions Division, of Research Triangle Park, N.C. For each legal Hebrew input string, this analyzer returns all legal lexical candidates as possible analyses of the given string, along with the following characteristics of each candidate:
A number of methods have been proposed for resolving the ambiguity of Hebrew morphological analysis. Most methods use contextual information. Levinger et al. describe a context-free method in an article entitled “Learning Morpho-Lexical Probabilities from an Untagged Corpus with an Application to Hebrew,” published in Computational Linguistics 2(3), pages 383–404 (1993), which is incorporated herein by reference. In studying a large Hebrew text base, the authors found that 55% of the words had more than one morphological reading, and 33% had more than two. They describe a method of disambiguation based on gathering statistics on the text base, so as to determine, for each word, a morpho-lexical probability for each of its alternative analyses, indicating the likelihood that the analysis is correct. An analysis of a given word that has a significantly higher probability than the alternatives is taken to be the correct one, regardless of the context and the form of the word.
In preferred embodiments of the present invention, a Hebrew morphological disambiguator receives the output of a morphological analyzer and prunes the number of candidate analyses for each word. The pruning is based on the morphological patterns of the different analyses, rather than on the words themselves as in the above-mentioned system described by Levinger et al. The “pattern” of a word, in this context, consists of a certain combination of linguistic characteristics, which are typically provided by the morphological analyzer. Preferably, these characteristics include the part of speech, prefix, number, gender, person and, in the case of verbs, the tense and conjugation model. Statistical data from a large corpus of text are used to determine a frequency of occurrence of each possible pattern, independent of the base words, or lemmas, to which the pattern is applied. The disambiguator prunes out those candidates whose pattern occurs with low frequency.
Pattern-based disambiguation is advantageous, by comparison with word-based schemes, because there are far fewer possible patterns than there are words. As a result, pattern statistics are more stable and reliable and easier to handle than word statistics. For example, in a corpus of 10 million Hebrew words studied by the inventors, only 2,300 different patterns were found, as opposed to 25,000 unique words. The methods provided by preferred embodiments of the present invention thus enables context-free disambiguation of text with improved efficiency and confidence by comparison with methods known in the art. Alternatively or additionally, the principles of the present invention may be implemented in conjunction with context-dependent disambiguation schemes.
In some preferred embodiments of the present invention, the disambiguator is used as part of a system for searching a corpus of text documents, such as the above-mentioned GURU system. Preferably, the disambiguator is used to prune the number of analyses of the words in the documents that are included in a search index of the corpus. It is then used again to analyze the words in a user query, so as to determine the lemmas to search for in the index.
Alternatively, the present invention may be used in other linguistic processing applications, such as computerized natural language processing and speech analysis, as well as spell-checking. Dealing with Hebrew spelling is a particularly difficult problem, since almost any string can be interpreted as a legal word. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a spell-checking program uses pattern-based morphological analysis, as described herein, to identify strings having rare morphological patterns as potential misspellings.
While preferred embodiments are described herein with reference to the Hebrew language, the principles of morphological disambiguation described herein are also applicable to other morphologically-rich languages, including particularly other Semitic languages, such as Arabic.
There is therefore provided, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a method for morphological disambiguation, including:
morphologically analyzing the string to generate a list of candidate analyses of the string, each candidate analysis including a respective word and a linguistic pattern of the word; and
evaluating the pattern of each of the analyses against a predefined criterion in order to select one or more of the analyses from the list.
Preferably, receiving the input string includes receiving a word in a Semitic language, most preferably in Hebrew.
Further preferably, the linguistic pattern includes a specification of at least one characteristic of the word, selected from a set of characteristics including a part of speech, prefix, number, gender and person of the word. Most preferably, the specification of the at least one characteristic includes a specification of all of the characteristics in the set. Additionally or alternatively, when the base word includes a verb, the linguistic pattern further includes a designation of a tense and conjugation pattern of the verb.
In a preferred embodiment, each of the analyses has a lemma and a paradigm determined by the word and the linguistic pattern thereof, and evaluating the pattern includes eliminating one of the analyses from the list if it has the same lemma and paradigm as another of the analyses.
Preferably, evaluating the pattern includes determining a relative frequency of occurrence of the pattern of each of the analyses, and selecting the at least one of the analyses whose frequency of occurrence is above a predetermined threshold. Most preferably, determining the relative frequency of occurrence includes morphologically analyzing a corpus of text and finding the frequency of occurrence of the pattern in the corpus, wherein determining the relative frequency of occurrence includes storing in a table the frequency of occurrence found in the corpus, and looking up the pattern in the table. Additionally or alternatively, selecting the at least one of the analyses includes setting the threshold so as to control how many of the analyses from the list are selected. Further additionally or alternatively, selecting the at least one of the analyses includes selecting the at least one of the analyses based on the pattern thereof, and substantially independently of the respective word.
In a preferred embodiment, the method includes searching in a corpus of text for a match to the input string using the one or more selected analyses. In another preferred embodiment, the method includes checking a document for spelling errors using the one or more selected analyses.
There is also provided, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a method for searching a corpus of text made up of words, including:
morphologically analyzing the words in the corpus to generate, for each of at least some of the words, a list of candidate analyses, each candidate analysis including a respective lemma and a linguistic pattern relating the lemma to the analyzed word;
evaluating the pattern of each of the analyses against a predefined criterion in order to select one or more of the analyses from the list for each of the analyzed words;
entering the lemmas of the selected analyses in an index of the corpus; and
Preferably, applying the search query includes:
morphologically analyzing and disambiguating the string to generate one or more search lemmas for the string; and
There is further provided, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a computer software product, including a computer-readable medium in which program instructions are stored, which instructions, when read by a computer, cause the computer to morphologically analyze an input string to generate a list of candidate analyses of the string, each candidate analysis including a respective word and a linguistic pattern of the word, and to evaluate the pattern of each of the analyses against a predefined criterion in order to select one or more of the analyses from the list.
There is additionally provided, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a computer software product, including a computer-readable medium in which program instructions are stored, which instructions, when read by a computer, cause the computer to morphologically analyze the words in the corpus to generate, for each of at least some of the words, a list of candidate analyses, each candidate analysis including a respective lemma and a linguistic pattern relating the lemma to the analyzed word, to evaluate the pattern of each of the analyses against a predefined criterion in order to select one or more of the analyses from the list for each of the analyzed words, to enter the lemmas of the selected analyses in an index of the corpus, and to apply a search query to the index.
There is furthermore provided, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, apparatus for morphological disambiguation, including a linguistic processor, which is adapted to receive an input string, to morphologically analyze the string to generate a list of candidate analyses of the string, each candidate analysis including a respective word and a linguistic pattern of the word, and to evaluate the pattern of each of the analyses against a predefined criterion in order to select one or more of the analyses from the list.
There is moreover provided, in accordance with a preferred embodiment of the present invention, apparatus for searching a corpus of text made up of words, including a linguistic processor, which is adapted to morphologically analyze the words in the corpus to generate, for each of at least some of the words, a list of candidate analyses, each candidate analysis including a respective lemma and a linguistic pattern relating the lemma to the analyzed word, to evaluate the pattern of each of the analyses against a predefined criterion in order to select one or more of the analyses from the list for each of the analyzed words, to enter the lemmas of the selected analyses in an index of the corpus, and to apply a search query to the index.
The present invention will be more fully understood from the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments thereof, taken together with the drawings in which:
In typical operation, system 20 operates on a corpus of text documents, which are stored in one or more storage devices 28, either local to processor 22 or accessed via a network. System 20 processes the documents to determine the lemmas of the words in the text and, preferably, to build an index to the corpus based on these lemmas. A user of system 20 inputs a search string 30, such as the Hebrew word “mishtara,” mentioned in the Background of the Invention. The system finds the lemma (or multiple candidate lemmas) of the search string and uses it to retrieve matching documents from the corpus, based on the index. One such match 32, “hamishtartiyim” (a plural, adjectival form of “police,” prefixed by the definite article) is shown on display 26 by way of example. While string matching and other naive algorithms would fail to find this match, morphological processing based on the methods described herein enables matches like this one to be found with good precision.
The output of analyzer 42 is processed by a filter 44, in order to remove variant analyses that are not considered relevant for the purpose of indexing. Preferably, the filter removes corrected forms of words, i.e., analyses that the morphological analyzer has inferred by adding optional vowel letters that are absent in the original input string. This rule is motivated by the assumption that generally only the original string is a candidate to be indexed (or to be searched).
Additionally or alternatively, the filter eliminates multiple analyses having the same lemma and paradigm, leaving only one representative base form for each such set. The “paradigm” of a word in this context is preferably taken to be its part of speech (noun, verb, etc.), with the addition of its conjugation pattern (binyan) in the case of verbs. The reason for this rule is that different inflections of the same lemma do not add information that should be stored in the index. For example, the words inyani (my interest), inyanay (my interests) and inyanei (the interests of) are all constructs of the same lemma and paradigm: inyan—interest (noun). These three variants are typically spelled identically in Hebrew. Filter 42 removes two of the variants.
The application of these two filtering rules together was found to reduce the average number of analyses per word from 2.15 to 1.91. Alternatively, other filtering algorithms, or no filtering, may be used.
The filtered list of analyses is input to a statistical disambiguator 46. The disambiguator decides which of the candidate analyses are likely to be correct based on a statistical base 48 of morphological patterns. The morphological pattern of a given analysis is preferably defined as a tuple of the values of the following characteristics:
Tense and conjugation apply only to verbs, while status applies only to non-verbs. This combination of characteristics was found to be convenient and useful in analyzing Hebrew morphology. It will be understood, however, that other combinations and sub-combinations of characteristics may also be used, including properties not listed in the table above. Those skilled in the art will recognize appropriate characteristics to use in defining morphological patterns for languages other than Hebrew.
In order to generate frequency statistics, ambiguous words, for which the analyzer returned multiple analyses, are preferably removed from the sample, at an ambiguity elimination step 54. This step reduced the initial 10 million words in the inventors' corpus to about 4.5 million words. At a counting step 56, a counter is incremented for each instance of each legal pattern that is encountered among the remaining, unambiguous words. The final count values are preferably hashed, for efficient retrieval, and are stored in a global pattern table in base 48, at a storage step 58.
At a decision step 65, disambiguator 46 determines how the candidate analyses are to be handled, depending upon the number of analyses delivered by filter 44. If no legal analysis was found by analyzer 42, the disambiguator simply returns the base string that was input to system 20, at a base return step 66. If the filter delivered a single legal analysis, the disambiguator returns the lemma of this analysis, at a lemma return step 68. On the other hand, if multiple candidate analyses were found, the disambiguator finds the pattern tuple for each analysis, at a pattern finding step 70. It looks up the tuples in the pattern table of pattern base 46 to find their respective frequencies, at a lookup step 72. A relative frequency is calculated for each of the candidate patterns, at a relative frequency determination step 74. The relative frequency for each pattern is preferably given by the frequency of that pattern, as listed in the global table, divided by the sum of the frequencies of all of the patterns that were found for the current input word.
At a sorting step 76, the relative frequencies are compared to a threshold parameter ε. The choice of the value of ε depends on how drastically the list of candidate analyses is to be pruned. Analyses with relative frequencies below the threshold are rejected, at a rejection step 78. The lemmas of all analyses having frequencies above the threshold are returned at step 68. These lemmas are typically used in building a search index for documents in a corpus or for searching the index thereafter, based on a given query word or words. When multiple lemmas are returned by step 76, their relative frequencies are preferably returned, as well, for use in the search application. Since the relevance score of a document retrieved in a search typically depends on the frequency of occurrence of the query terms inside the document, and some of the terms will have multiple lemmas, the search would be biased in favor of ambiguous terms if all of the lemmas were allowed to contribute equally to the score. Therefore, the relative frequencies of the lemmas are preferably used as a weighting factor in computing the relevance scores.
Thus, by judicious choice of the threshold parameter, a search index can be built and search queries analyzed with enhanced precision, relative to methods know in the art. “Precision” in this context refers to the proportion of relevant items out of the total number of items that are retrieved in the search. The cost of this precision is a reduced level of “recall,” meaning that relevant items will sometimes be missed, because the disambiguator has pruned out the “true” analysis of a term. Therefore, the threshold ε is preferably chosen to give an optimal tradeoff between search efficiency and thoroughness.
Alternatively, system 20 and the methods described hereinabove may be integrated in other linguistic processing applications, such as computerized natural language processing. Furthermore, although system 20 is designed to operate on Hebrew language texts, the principles of morphological disambiguation described herein are also applicable to other morphologically-rich languages, including particularly other Semitic languages, such as Arabic.
It will thus be appreciated that the preferred embodiments described above are cited by way of example, and that the present invention is not limited to what has been particularly shown and described hereinabove. Rather, the scope of the present invention includes both combinations and subcombinations of the various features described hereinabove, as well as variations and modifications thereof which would occur to persons skilled in the art upon reading the foregoing description and which are not disclosed in the prior art.
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