At this moment a lot of companies offer end-point services (data providers, semantic analysis, …) that we can integrate with our applications. However, when designing our own service, it could be tough find the ideal parameters to configure it and to find the best software to make it scalable and highly available.
Continuous-Time Markov Chains (Yin, G. et all, 1998) (CTMC) provides an ideal framework to estimate this most important parameters, and by means of simulations we can find them. An special model of CTMC which belongs to the Queuing Theory (Breuer, L. et all, 2005) is the M/M/c/K model, and modelize our service like a queuing system, implying that our system holds:
- c: the number of parallel process
- K: is the maximum number of clients waiting in the queue
- Input: Poisson
- Service: Exponential
E.g.: The next CTMC can represent a simple M/M/3/4 queuing system (Download .dot):
M/M/c/K model simulation ------------------------ + MODEL PARAMETERS Lambda: 40.0000 Mu: 30.0000 c: 3.0000 K: 7.0000 Stability: True (rho = 0.4444) + QUEUE Average number of clients (l) = 1.4562 Average length (lq) = 0.1268 Average waiting time for a client into the queue (w) = 0.0365 + SYSTEM Average waiting time into the system (wq) = 0.0032 + PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTION P_0 = 0.2550368777 P_1 = 0.340049170234300 P_2 = 0.226699446822867 P_3 = 0.100755309699052 P_4 = 0.044780137644023 P_5 = 0.019902283397344 P_6 = 0.008845459287708 P_7 = 0.003931315238981 [Total Probability: 1.0] Elapsed time: 0.00025105
Once we have calculated the best-fit values for our system, it is time to present our service based on a Wikipedia Semantic Graph. The next picture shows the main structure creating relations between articles and categories:
So, in first instance our service will perform lookup queries in order to identify Entities onto a text. We can see the result of a query to our service:
Up to this point, we have calculated several parameters for our system: Incoming Lambda (λ), Service Mu (μ), c (parallel servers) and K (queue length). To ensure the system holds these several constrains we should implement a two layers throttle system.
- IPTABLES filter: Several clients will try to access to our system, however only a portion of them will succeed.
- LOGIC filter: Is a software based filter and perform this throttle by means of user tokens. It applies temporal restrictions handling the incoming rate of each user.
Therefore, the following software help us to implement these restrictions:
- Iptables filter: Using Iptables (debian-administration.org) we can restrict the incoming connections avoiding denial-of-service attack (DoS).
- Logic filter: Using a time control and token manager script we can deal with this problem.
- Several parallel servers and queue system: We set up Gunicorn to run several tornado servers to implement the queue restrictions.
nohup gunicorn --workers 3 --backlog 7 --limit-request-line 4094 --limit-request-fields 4 -b 0.0.0.0:8000-k egg:gunicorn#tornado server:app &
A sample tornado server scaffold for our service could be:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import tornado.ioloop
from tornado.web import Application, RequestHandler, asynchronous
from tornado.ioloop import IOLoop
# Main class
class NerService(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
# run application
app = tornado.web.Application([
(r"/", NerService, dict(...parameters...),
])
# To test single server file"
app.listen(8000)
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
Finally, after applying this configuration we have simulated several incoming rates (testing sundry numbers of clients too) getting the next service performance statistics represented in the picture below:
Summing up:
- Using wikipedia categories and articles, we are able to detect a huge range of Entities.
- Wikipedia is always updated in real time, therefore we have a updated NER (Name Entities Recognition).
- We can use Gunicorn to run and manage serveral service instances.
- We have implemented a throttle system to restrict the maximum number of requests per second. Also the way to restrict the general incoming rate by means of iptables is provided.
- It is proven to be neccessary to simulate different invocations of our services using Queuing Theory formulae to find the best-fit paramaters like λ, μ, ρ, L, Lq, W, Wq.
1.The problem of unstructured information
Scraping is the technique used for extracting data from these sources, and maybe the most common type is the so-called web scraping, used to get relevant information from sites on the Internet. scraping is very useful to extract information from documents or sources organized always in a certain manner. However, when the layout may change quickly over time or may differ to a large extent among different sources – as usually happens in the web – , scraping is an endless task. Once the desired data is extracted in a manner that the computers can process it as second problem is faced. Since documents are created by humans for humans, the information is written in what is called “Natural Language”, the way we use to talk or write: human language. Hence, information is still raw and it requieres a processing step before the machines can manipulate it and do any kind of computation with it. There are many Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches but at this point it’s enough to know that this technique it’s aimed to extract the meaning of texts (or even speech).
2. Unitex Corpus Processor
The Unitex software was developed at the Linguistic group (Prof. Eric Laporte) of the Institut Gaspard Monge, Université de Marne-La-Vallée and is a corpus processing system, based on automata-oriented technology. Unitex is able to perform several operations like:
- Apply electronic dictionaries, that you can create ad-hoc for a particular domain.
- Pattern matching with recursive transition networks.
- Resolve ambiguity by means of the text automaton.
However, Unitex can apply advance operations too like ELAG (Elimination of Lexical Ambiguities by Grammars) for disambiguation between lexical symbols in text automata or Cascade of transducers (The prototype of the CasSys system was created in 2002 at the LI labs at University of Tours) applying one after the other onto a text to modify this text.
A very simple example of Unitex grammar is shown in the following figure:
Unitex has been applied in several research papers [3], e.g.:
- Portuguese Large-scale Language Resources for NLP Applications
- Syntactic variation of support verb constructions
- XML-Based Representation Formats of Local Grammars for the NL
- Spanish adverbial frozen expressions
Unitex provides a great User Interface to manage our Grammars and dictionaries but also a fast binding to perform specific operations onto a text is provided by Paradigma Labs.
3. UnitexManager
Unitex-manager is a python module which provides a high level layer to easily work with the above described Unitex Corpus Processor. Unitex-manager is based on pyUnitex, a minimalist python wrapper used as an interface to interact with the C interface of Unitex.
Natural Language Processing requires a first stage of language recognition and then a transformation of the whole text into simpler units, usually sentences. Hence text is tokenized first and then each sentence is pos-tagged, labeling words with its grammatical or/and its semantical function. For that purpose, different dictionaries are used; some of them are included with Unitex (basic language) but some of them (entities recognition, for example) should be prepared by a documentalist in advance. Finally, the tagged sentences run through a grammar (Unitex Graph) generating the desired output.
Unitex-manager interface contains three methods representing these three actions:
tokenizer(input_str, lang)Given a text and its language returns an arrray containing its sentences splitted by the dot (".") characterpostagger(tokens, lang)Given an array of sentences (and its language) returns them same sentences tagged with Part-of-Speech labels.grammar(tokens, pos, lang)Evaluates the given pos-tagged sentences with the grammar set-up in the configuration file.
An example of the execution flow can be seen in the next figure:
4. A practical case
To give an example of the use of Unitex-Manager we have prepared a practical case of unstructured information retrieval and processing. In this case, the evolution of the most active values during the day in the NASDAQ stock exchange will be followed.
First of all, it’s necessary to find a reliable source of information. Financial information is widespread among a real mess of websites, however we have found that yahoo! Finance provides just the required information (here) already compiled and updates it very often. Once the information is found, is necessary to analyze its structure and prepare a web-scrapper. In our case, we created our own scrapper written in Ruby that is launched once in a while to extract the symbol and the name of the company as well as the last change.
This text is pased to the Unitex-Manager and processed with the workflow described above to extract the following entities:
- Company name
- Symbol
- Change
- Trend
Each our we extract this information to calculate the top five of most active companies in NASDAQ based on the absolute value of their growth and we tweet this Top-5 in the Financial Unitex account so you can easily follow how the stock exchange evolves.
Introduction
It’s been a while since Google introduced their MapReduce framework for distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers. Paradigma Labs was thinking of trying Apache Hadoop to run this kind of tasks, so it was the proper choice to run some web scraping we have in our hands. I was the designated developer for the task, and my love for Ruby on Rails led me to give Hadoop Streaming a try so I could avoid Java to write the scripts. Many will agree on the virtues of Ruby, specially considering gems like Mechanize for web scraping and Rails gems like ActiveResource for accessing REST web services and ActiveRecord for ORM with a database like MySQL.
All the howto steps after the jump.
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