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Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
S.Karthik, Assistant Professor,
Department of Information Technology,
Sri Ramakrishna College of Arts & Science, Coimbatore
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
A tagged word of the form (word, tag) is an association between a word and a
part-of-speech tag.
Once we start doing part-of-speech tagging, we will be creating programs that
assign a tag to a word, the tag which is most likely in a given context.
We can think of this process as mapping from words to tags.
The most natural way to store mappings in Python uses the so-called dictionary
data type.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Indexing Lists Versus Dictionaries
A text is treated in Python as a list of words.
An important property of lists is that we can “look up” a particular item by
giving its index, e.g., text1[100].
We specify a number and get back a word.
We can think of a list as a simple kind of table, as shown in figure below.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
With frequency distributions, where we specify a word and get back a number,
e.g., fdist['monstrous'], which tells us the number of times a given word has
occurred in a text.
Lookup using words is familiar to anyone who has used a dictionary. Some more
examples are shown in figure below.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
In the case of a phonebook, we look up an entry using a name and get back a
number.
When we type a domain name in a web browser, the computer looks this up to
get back an IP address.
A word frequency table allows us to look up a word and find its frequency in a
text collection.
In all these cases, we are mapping from names to numbers, rather than the
other way around as with a list.
In general, we would like to be able to map between arbitrary types of
information.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Table below lists a variety of linguistic objects, along with what they map.
Most often, we are mapping from a “word” to some structured object.
For example, a document index maps from a word to a list of pages.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Dictionaries in Python
Python provides a dictionary data type that can be used for mapping between
arbitrary types.
It is like a conventional dictionary, in that it gives you an efficient way to look
things up.
However, Dictionaries in Python has a much wider range of uses.
To illustrate, we define pos to be an empty dictionary and then add four entries
to it, specifying the part-of-speech of some words.
We add entries to a dictionary using the familiar square bracket notation.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Example.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
So, for example, say that the part-of-speech of colorless is adjective, or more
specifically, that the key 'colorless' is assigned the value 'ADJ' in dictionary pos.
When we inspect the value of pos we see a set of key-value pairs.
Once we have populated the dictionary in this way, we can employ the keys to
retrieve values.
We might accidentally use a key that hasn’t been assigned a value.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Unlike lists and strings, where we can use len() to work out which integers will
be legal indexes, how do we work out the legal keys for a dictionary?
If the dictionary is not too big, we can simply inspect its contents by evaluating
the variable pos, this gives us the key-value pairs.
They are not in the same order they were originally entered; this is because
dictionaries are not sequences but mappings, and the keys are not inherently
ordered.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Alternatively, to just find the keys, we can either convert the dictionary to a list
or use the dictionary in a context where a list is expected, as the parameter of
sorted() or in a for loop.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
As well as iterating over all keys in the dictionary with a for loop, we can use the
for loop as we did for printing lists.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Finally, the dictionary methods keys(), values(), and items() allow us to access
the keys, values, and key-value pairs as separate lists.
We can even sort tuples, which orders them according to their first element.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
We want to be sure that when we look something up in a dictionary, we get only
one value for each key.
Now suppose we try to use a dictionary to store the fact that the word sleep can
be used as both a verb and a noun.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Initially, pos['sleep'] is given the value 'V’.
But this is immediately overwritten with the new value, 'N’.
In other words, there can be only one entry in the dictionary for 'sleep’.
However, there is a way of storing multiple values in that entry: we use a list
value, e.g., pos['sleep'] = ['N', 'V'].
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Defining Dictionaries
We can use the same key-value pair format to create a dictionary.
There are a couple of ways to do this, and we will normally use the first.
The dictionary keys must be immutable types, such as strings and tuples. If we
try to define a dictionary using a mutable key, we get a TypeError.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Default Dictionaries
If we try to access a key that is not in a dictionary, we get an error.
However, it’s often useful if a dictionary can automatically create an entry for
this new key and give it a default value, such as zero or the empty list.
Since Python 2.5, a special kind of dictionary called a defaultdict has been
available.
In order to use it, we have to supply a parameter which can be used to create
the default value, e.g., int, float, str, list, dict, tuple.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Example.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
The preceding examples specified the default value of a dictionary entry to be
the default value of a particular data type.
However, we can specify any default value we like, simply by providing the
name of a function that can be called with no arguments to create the required
value.
Let’s return to our part-of-speech example, and create a dictionary whose
default value for any entry is 'N’ .
When we access a non-existent entry, it is automatically added to the
dictionary.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Let’s see how default dictionaries could be used in a more substantial language
processing task.
Many language processing tasks- including tagging - struggle to correctly process
the hapaxes of a text.
They can perform better with a fixed vocabulary and a guarantee that no new
words will appear.
We can preprocess a text to replace low-frequency words with a special “out of
vocabulary” token, UNK, with the help of a default dictionary.
We need to create a default dictionary that maps each word to its replacement.
The most frequent n words will be mapped to themselves.
Everything else will be mapped to UNK.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Example.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Incrementally Updating a Dictionary
We can employ dictionaries to count occurrences, emulating the method for
tallying words.
We begin by initializing an empty defaultdict, then process each part-of-speech
tag in the text.
If the tag hasn’t been seen before, it will have a zero count by default.
Each time we encounter a tag, we increment its count using the += operator.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Example.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
The listing in previous example illustrates an important idiom for sorting a
dictionary by its values, to show words in decreasing order of frequency.
The first parameter of sorted() is the items to sort, which is a list of tuples
consisting of a POS tag and a frequency.
The second parameter specifies the sort key using a function itemgetter().
In general, itemgetter(n) returns a function that can be called on some other
sequence object to obtain the nth element.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
The last parameter of sorted() specifies that the items should be returned in
reverse order, i.e., decreasing values of frequency.
There’s a second useful programming idiom at the beginning of previous
example, where we initialize a defaultdict and then use a for loop to update its
values. Here’s a schematic version.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Here’s another instance of this pattern, where we index words according to their
last two letters.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
The following example uses the same pattern to create an anagram dictionary.
Since accumulating words like this is such a common task, NLTK provides a more
convenient way of creating a defaultdict(list), in the form of nltk.Index().
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
We can use default dictionaries with complex keys and values.
Let’s study the range of possible tags for a word, given the word itself and the
tag of the previous word.
We will see how this information can be used by a POS tagger.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
The example uses a dictionary whose default value for an entry is a dictionary
(whose default value is int(), i.e., zero).
Notice how we iterated over the bigrams of the tagged corpus, processing a pair
of word-tag pairs for each iteration .
Each time through the loop we updated our pos dictionary’s entry for (t1, w2), a
tag and its following word.
When we look up an item in pos we must specify a compound key, and we get
back a dictionary object.
A POS tagger could use such information to decide that the word right, when
preceded by a determiner, should be tagged as ADJ.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Inverting a Dictionary
Dictionaries support efficient lookup, so long as you want to get the value for
any key.
If d is a dictionary and k is a key, we type d[k] and immediately obtain the
value.
Finding a key given a value is slower and more cumbersome.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
If we expect to do this kind of “reverse lookup” often, it helps to construct a
dictionary that maps values to keys.
In the case that no two keys have the same value, this is an easy thing to do.
We just get all the key-value pairs in the dictionary, and create a new dictionary
of value-key pairs.
The below example also illustrates another way of initializing a dictionary pos
with key-value pairs.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Let’s first make our part-of-speech dictionary a bit more realistic and add some
more words to pos using the dictionary update() method, to create the situation
where multiple keys have the same value.
Then the technique just shown for reverse lookup will no longer work.
Instead, we have to use append() to accumulate the words for each part-of-
speech, as follows.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
Now we have inverted the pos dictionary, and can look up any part-of-speech
and find all words having that part-of-speech.
We can do the same thing even more simply using NLTK’s support for indexing,
as follows.
A summary of Python’s dictionary methods is given in the table given next.
Mapping Words to Properties Using Python
Dictionaries
