NLP Pipelines

Concepts

Spark ML provides a set of Machine Learning applications that can be build using two main components: Estimators and Transformers. The Estimators have a method called fit() which secures and trains a piece of data to such application. The Transformer is generally the result of a fitting process and applies changes to the the target dataset. These components have been embedded to be applicable to Spark NLP.

Pipelines are a mechanism for combining multiple estimators and transformers in a single workflow. They allow multiple chained transformations along a Machine Learning task. For more information please refer to Spark ML library.

Annotation

The basic result of a NLP operation is an annotation. It’s structure includes:

annotatorType: the type of annotator that generated the current annotation
begin: the begin of the matched content relative to raw-text
end: the end of the matched content relative to raw-text
result: the main output of the annotation
metadata: content of matched result and additional information
embeddings: (new in 2.0) contains vector mappings if required

This object is automatically generated by annotators after a transform process. No manual work is required. However, it is important to clearly understand the structure of an annotation to be able too efficiently use it.

Annotators

Annotators are the spearhead of NLP functions in Spark NLP. There are two forms of annotators:

Annotator Approaches: are those who represent a Spark ML Estimator and require a training stage. They have a function called fit(data) which trains a model based on some data. They produce the second type of annotator which is an annotator model or transformer.
Annotator Models: are spark models or transformers, meaning they have a transform(data) function. This function takes as input a dataframe to which it adds a new column containing the result of the current annotation. All transformers are additive, meaning they append to current data, never replace or delete previous information.

Both forms of annotators can be included in a Pipeline. All annotators included in a Pipeline will be automatically executed in the defined order and will transform the data accordingly. A Pipeline is turned into a PipelineModel after the fit() stage. The Pipeline can be saved to disk and re-loaded at any time.

Common Functions

setInputCols(column_names): Takes a list of column names of annotations required by this annotator. Those are generated by the annotators which precede the current annotator in the pipeline.
setOutputCol(column_name): Defines the name of the column containing the result of the current annotator. Use this name as an input for other annotators down the pipeline requiring the outputs generated by the current annotator.

Quickly annotate some text

You can run these examples using Python or Scala.

The easiest way to run the python examples is by starting a pyspark jupyter notebook including the spark-nlp package:

$ java -version
# should be Java 8 (Oracle or OpenJDK)
$ conda create -n sparknlp python=3.7 -y
$ conda activate sparknlp
# spark-nlp by default is based on pyspark 3.x
$ pip install spark-nlp==4.2.2 pyspark==3.2.1 jupyter
$ jupyter notebook

Explain Document ML

Spark NLP offers a variety of pretrained pipelines that will help you get started, and get a sense of how the library works. We are constantly working on improving the available content. You can checkout a demo application of the Explain Document ML pipeline here:

View Demo

Downloading and using a pretrained pipeline

Explain Document ML (explain_document_ml) is a pretrained pipeline that does a little bit of everything NLP related. Let’s try it out in scala. Note that the first time you run the below code it might take longer since it downloads the pretrained pipeline from our servers!

from johnsnowlabs import nlp
spark = nlp.start()

explain_document_pipeline = nlp.PretrainedPipeline("explain_document_ml")
annotations = explain_document_pipeline.annotate("We are very happy about SparkNLP")
print(annotations)

OUTPUT:
{
  'stem': ['we', 'ar', 'veri', 'happi', 'about', 'sparknlp'],
  'checked': ['We', 'are', 'very', 'happy', 'about', 'SparkNLP'],
  'lemma': ['We', 'be', 'very', 'happy', 'about', 'SparkNLP'],
  'document': ['We are very happy about SparkNLP'],
  'pos': ['PRP', 'VBP', 'RB', 'JJ', 'IN', 'NNP'],
  'token': ['We', 'are', 'very', 'happy', 'about', 'SparkNLP'],
  'sentence': ['We are very happy about SparkNLP']
}

As you can see the explain_document_ml is able to annotate any “document” providing as output a list of stems, check-spelling, lemmas, part of speech tags, tokens and sentence boundary detection and all this “out-of-the-box”!.

Using a pretrained pipeline with spark dataframes

You can also use the pipeline with a spark dataframe. You just need to create first a spark dataframe with a column named “text” that will work as the input for the pipeline and then use the .transform() method to run the pipeline over that dataframe and store the outputs of the different components in a spark dataframe.

Remember than when starting jupyter notebook from pyspark or when running the spark-shell for scala, a Spark Session is started in the background by default within the namespace ‘scala’.

from johnsnowlabs import nlp
spark = nlp.start()

sentences = [
  ['Hello, this is an example sentence'],
  ['And this is a second sentence.']
]

# spark is the Spark Session automatically started by pyspark.
data = spark.createDataFrame(sentences).toDF("text")

# Download the pretrained pipeline from Johnsnowlab's servers
explain_document_pipeline = nlp.PretrainedPipeline("explain_document_ml")

OUTPUT:
explain_document_ml download started this may take some time.
Approx size to download 9.4 MB
[OK!]

# Transform 'data' and store output in a new 'annotations_df' dataframe
annotations_df = explain_document_pipeline.transform(data)

# Show the results
annotations_df.show()

OUTPUT:
+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+
|                text|            document|            sentence|               token|             checked|               lemma|                stem|                 pos|
+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+
|Hello, this is an...|[[document, 0, 33...|[[document, 0, 33...|[[token, 0, 4, He...|[[token, 0, 4, He...|[[token, 0, 4, He...|[[token, 0, 4, he...|[[pos, 0, 4, UH, ...|
|And this is a sec...|[[document, 0, 29...|[[document, 0, 29...|[[token, 0, 2, An...|[[token, 0, 2, An...|[[token, 0, 2, An...|[[token, 0, 2, an...|[[pos, 0, 2, CC, ...|
+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+--------------------+

Manipulating pipelines

The output of the previous DataFrame was in terms of Annotation objects. This output is not really comfortable to deal with, as you can see by running the code:

annotations_df.select("token").show(truncate=False)

OUTPUT:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|token                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|[[token, 0, 4, Hello, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 5, 5, ,, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 7, 10, this, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 12, 13, is, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 15, 16, an, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 18, 24, example, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 26, 33, sentence, [sentence -> 0], [], []]]|
|[[token, 0, 2, And, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 4, 7, this, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 9, 10, is, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 12, 12, a, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 14, 19, second, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 21, 28, sentence, [sentence -> 0], [], []], [token, 29, 29, ., [sentence -> 0], [], []]]    |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

What if we want to deal with just the resulting annotations? We can use the Finisher annotator, retrieve the Explain Document ML pipeline, and add them together in a Spark ML Pipeline. Remember that pretrained pipelines expect the input column to be named “text”.

from johnsnowlabs import nlp

spark = nlp.start()
finisher = nlp.Finisher().setInputCols(["token", "lemmas", "pos"])
explain_pipeline_model = nlp.PretrainedPipeline("explain_document_ml").model

pipeline = nlp.Pipeline() \
    .setStages([
        explain_pipeline_model,
        finisher
        ])


sentences = [
    ['Hello, this is an example sentence'],
    ['And this is a second sentence.']
]
data = spark.createDataFrame(sentences).toDF("text")

model = pipeline.fit(data)
annotations_finished_df = model.transform(data)

annotations_finished_df.select('finished_token').show(truncate=False)

OUTPUT:
+-------------------------------------------+
|finished_token                             |
+-------------------------------------------+
|[Hello, ,, this, is, an, example, sentence]|
|[And, this, is, a, second, sentence, .]    |
+-------------------------------------------+

Setup your own pipeline

Annotator types

Every annotator has a type. Those annotators that share a type, can be used interchangeably, meaning you could use any of them when needed.

For example, when a token type annotator is required by another annotator, such as a sentiment analysis annotator, you can either provide a normalized token or a lemma, as both are of type token.

DocumentAssembler: Getting data in

In order to get through the NLP process, we need to get raw data annotated. There is a special transformer that does this for us: the DocumentAssembler, it creates the first annotation of type Document which may be used by annotators down the road.

documentAssembler = nlp.DocumentAssembler() \
    .setInputCol("text") \
    .setOutputCol("document")

Sentence detection and tokenization

In this quick example, we now proceed to identify the sentences in the input document. SentenceDetector requires a Document annotation, which is provided by the DocumentAssembler output, and it’s itself a Document type token. The Tokenizer requires a Document annotation type. That means it works both with DocumentAssembler or SentenceDetector output. In the following example we use the sentence output.

sentenceDetector = nlp.SentenceDetector() \
    .setInputCols(["document"]) \
    .setOutputCol("Sentence")

regexTokenizer = nlp.Tokenizer() \
    .setInputCols(["sentence"]) \
    .setOutputCol("token")

Spark NLP also includes another special transformer, called Finisher to show tokens in a human language.

finisher = nlp.Finisher() \
    .setInputCols(["token"]) \
    .setCleanAnnotations(False)

Finisher: Getting data out

At the end of each pipeline or any stage that was done by Spark NLP, you may want to get results out whether onto another pipeline or simply write them on disk. The Finisher annotator helps you to clean the metadata (if it’s set to true) and output the results into an array:

finisher = nlp.Finisher() \
    .setInputCols(["token"]) \
    .setIncludeMetadata(True)

If you need to have a flattened DataFrame (each sub-array in a new column) from any annotations other than struct type columns, you can use explode function from Spark SQL. You can also use Apache Spark functions (SQL) to manipulate the output DataFrame in any way you need. Here we combine the tokens and NER results together:

from johnsnowlabs import nlp
df.withColumn("tmp", nlp.F.explode("chunk")).select("tmp.*")

Using Spark ML Pipeline

Now we want to put all this together and retrieve the results, we use a Pipeline for this. We use the same data in fit() that we will use in transform since none of the pipeline stages have a training stage.

from johnsnowlabs import nlp
pipeline = nlp.Pipeline() \
    .setStages([
        documentAssembler,
        sentenceDetector,
        regexTokenizer,
        finisher
    ])

OUTPUT:
+-------------------------------------------+
|finished_token                             |
+-------------------------------------------+
|[hello, ,, this, is, an, example, sentence]|
+-------------------------------------------+

Using Spark NLP’s LightPipeline

LightPipeline is a Spark NLP specific Pipeline class equivalent to Spark ML Pipeline. The difference is that it’s execution does not hold to Spark principles, instead it computes everything locally (but in parallel) in order to achieve fast results when dealing with small amounts of data. This means, we do not input a Spark Dataframe, but a string or an Array of strings instead, to be annotated. To create Light Pipelines, you need to input an already trained (fit) Spark ML Pipeline. It’s transform() stage is converted into annotate() instead.

from johnsnowlabs import nlp
explain_document_pipeline = nlp.PretrainedPipeline("explain_document_ml")
lightPipeline = nlp.LightPipeline(explain_document_pipeline.model)

OUTPUT:
explain_document_ml download started this may take some time.
Approx size to download 9.4 MB
[OK!]

lightPipeline.annotate("Hello world, please annotate my text")

OUTPUT:
{'stem': ['hello', 'world', ',', 'pleas', 'annot', 'my', 'text'],
 'checked': ['Hello', 'world', ',', 'please', 'annotate', 'my', 'text'],
 'lemma': ['Hello', 'world', ',', 'please', 'annotate', 'i', 'text'],
 'document': ['Hello world, please annotate my text'],
 'pos': ['UH', 'NN', ',', 'VB', 'NN', 'PRP$', 'NN'],
 'token': ['Hello', 'world', ',', 'please', 'annotate', 'my', 'text'],
 'sentence': ['Hello world, please annotate my text']}

Training annotators

Training methodology

Training your own annotators is a key concept when dealing with real life scenarios. Any of the annotators provided above, such as pretrained pipelines and models, can be applied out-of-the-box to a specific use case, but better results are obtained when they are fine-tuned to your specific use-case. Dealing with real life problems ofter requires training your own models. In Spark NLP, we support three ways of training a custom annotator:

Train from a dataset. Most annotators are capable of training from a dataset passed to fit() method just as Spark ML does. Annotators that use the suffix Approach are such trainable annotators. Training from fit() is the standard behavior in Spark ML. Annotators have different schema requirements for training. Check the reference to see what are the requirements of each annotators.
Training from an external source: Some of our annotators train from an external file or folder passed to the annotator as a param. You will see such ones as setCorpus() or setDictionary() param setter methods, allowing you to configure the input to use. You can set Spark NLP to read them as Spark datasets or LINE_BY_LINE which is usually faster for small files.
Last but not least, some of our annotators are Deep Learning based. These models may be trained with the standard AnnotatorApproach API just like any other annotator. For more advanced users, we also allow importing your own graphs or even training from Python and converting them into an AnnotatorModel.

Spark ML Pipelines

SparkML Pipelines are a uniform structure that helps creating and tuning practical machine learning pipelines. Spark NLP integrates with them seamlessly so it is important to have this concept handy. Once a Pipeline is trained with fit(), it becomes a PipelineModel

Example:

from johnsnowlabs import nlp
pipeline = nlp.Pipeline().setStages([...])

LightPipeline

LightPipelines are Spark ML pipelines converted into a single machine but multithreaded task, becoming more than 10x times faster for smaller amounts of data (small is relative, but 50k sentences is roughly a good maximum). To use them, simply plug in a trained (fitted) pipeline.

Example:

from johnsnowlabs import nlp
nlp.LightPipeline(someTrainedPipeline).annotate(someStringOrArray)

Functions:

annotate(string or string[]): returns dictionary list of annotation results
fullAnnotate(string or string[]): returns dictionary list of entire annotations content For more details please refer to Using Spark NLP’s LightPipelines.

RecursivePipeline

Recursive pipelines are SparkNLP specific pipelines that allow a Spark ML Pipeline to know about itself on every Pipeline Stage task, allowing annotators to utilize this same pipeline against external resources to process them in the same way the user decides. Only some of our annotators take advantage of this. RecursivePipeline behaves exactly the same as normal Spark ML pipelines, so they can be used with the same intention.

Example:

from johnsnowlabs import nlp 
recursivePipeline = nlp.RecursivePipeline(stages=[
    documentAssembler,
    sentenceDetector,
    tokenizer,
    lemmatizer,
    finisher
])

Params and Features

Annotator parameters

SparkML uses ML Params to store pipeline parameter maps. In SparkNLP, we also use Features, which are a way to store parameter maps that are larger than just a string or a boolean. These features are serialized as either Parquet or RDD objects, allowing much faster and scalable annotator information. Features are also broadcasted among executors for better performance.

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