# Customizing scikits.learn for a specific text analysis task

Category: scikit-learn
#nlp #scikit-learn

Scikits.learn is a great general library, but machine learning has so many different application, that it is often very helpful to be able to extend its API to better integrate with your code. With scikits.learn, this is extremely easy to do using inheritance and using the pipeline module.

## The problem

While continuing the morphophonetic analysis of Romanian verbal forms, I found the need to streamline my workflow to allow for more complex models. There were a lot of free model parameters and it would have been painful to interactively tweak everything in order to find a good combination

In my case, I needed to read a file containing infinitives and labels corresponding to conjugation groups, and run a linear support vector classifier on this data. The SVC has its C parameter that needs to be tweaked, but I also had some ideas that arose from the images in my old post. There, I compared the way the data looked when represented as differently sized n-gram features. Furthermore, I compared the count features (ie. features indicating the number of times an n-gram occurs in a string) with binary features (ie. indicating only whether the n-gram occurs in the string or not). It looked to me like, for such a low-level text analysis task, using counts only adds noise.

For this reason, the feature_extraction.text.CountVectorizer was not enough for me. It only returns count features. There was also another thing that needed to be adjusted: by default, its analyzer uses a preprocessor that strips accented characters, and I had strong reasons to believe that Romanian diacritics are very relevant for the learning task. So, I needed to extend the vectorizer.

## The solution

The code I came up with is here. I tried to build a class that would be as specific to my needs as possible. It is important to retain the full API, however. Note the y=None parameter in the fit functions. Its necessity will become clear in a moment.

Another tricky part was exposing the max_n parameter from the inner analyzer. This was not really natural, but it simplified the constructions later on.

My InfinitivesExtractor class builds a data matrix from a list of strings. After using it, the data needs to be passed to the classifier, an instance of svm.LinearSVC. The pipelinemodule in scikits.learn allows us to plug components into eachother in order to build a more complex object. In this case, we would like a classifier that receives a string as input, and directly outputs its label. We wouldn’t want the user to have to manually use the feature extractor prior to classification.

The pipeline is very easy to build:

pipeline = Pipeline([('extr', InfinitivesExtractor()), ('svc', LinearSVC(multi_class=True))])
The pipeline object now works exactly as expected: we can call fit and predict on it. It also exposes the parameters of its constituents, by prefixing them with the name of that component. For example, the support vector machine’s C parameter can be accessed as pipeline.svc__C.

All that is left now is to see whether this is a good model, and what combination of parameters makes it work the best. Scikits.learn provides a great tool for choosing the parameters: the grid_search module. When working with models like support vector machines, model parameters (such as the radial basis kernel width) usually need to be chosen by cross validation, because intuition doesn’t help much when dealing with high dimensional data.

Grid search allows the definition of a discrete range of values for multiple parameters. Then, for each combination of parameters, it fits and evaluates a model using cross-validation, and the model with the best score is the winner. Because we combined the components into a pipeline, it is very easy to run grid search on the combined model, and to simultaneously tweak the settings both for the extractor and for the classifier.

After running the grid search using the code here, I found that indeed, using binary features instead of occurence counts improves performance. I also found that the optimal n-gram length is 5, but the gain is not that big when compared to a length of 3, which generates a lot less features.

## Conclusions

I hope that I managed to show the strength of a well-designed API. Because of it, it would be very easy to add, for example, an extra layer for dimensionality reduction before classification. It would only require an extra item in the pipeline constructor. A call from a web-based frontend, for example, would be very short and simple. Because of the consistency in the scikits.learn classes, we can write cleaner and better code, and therefore work with greater efficiency.