SoMaJo is a state-of-the-art tokenizer and sentence splitter for German and English web and social media texts. It won the EmpiriST 2015 shared task on automatic linguistic annotation of computer-mediated communication / social media. As such, it is particularly well-suited to perform tokenization on all kinds of written discourse, for example chats, forums, wiki talk pages, tweets, blog comments, social networks, SMS and WhatsApp dialogues.
In addition to tokenizing the input text, SoMaJo can also output token class information for each token, i.e. if it is a number, an emoticon, an abbreviation, etc.:
echo 'Wow, superTool!;)' | somajo-tokenizer -c -t -
Wow regular
, symbol
super regular
Tool regular
! symbol
;) emoticon
SoMaJo can also output additional information for each token that can help to reconstruct the original untokenized text (to a certain extent):
echo 'der beste Betreuer? - >ProfSmith! : )' | somajo-tokenizer -c -e -
der
beste
Betreuer SpaceAfter=No
?
-> SpaceAfter=No, OriginalSpelling="- >"
Prof SpaceAfter=No
Smith SpaceAfter=No
!
:) OriginalSpelling=": )"
The -t and -e options can also be used in combination, of course.
SoMaJo can split the input text into sentences using the
--split_sentences option.
SoMaJo has full XML support, i.e. it can perform sensible tokenization
and sentence splitting on well-formed XML files using the --xml and
--tag options.
The system is described in greater detail in Proisl and Uhrig (2016).
For part-of-speech tagging, we recommend SoMeWeTa, a part-of-speech tagger with state-of-the-art performance on German web and social media texts:
somajo-tokenizer --split_sentences <file> | somewe-tagger --tag <model> -
SoMaJo can be easily installed using pip (pip3 in some distributions):
pip install SoMaJo
Alternatively, you can download and decompress the latest release or clone the git repository:
git clone https://github.com/tsproisl/SoMaJo.git
In the new directory, run the following command:
python3 setup.py install
You can use the tokenizer as a standalone program from the command
line. General usage information is available via the -h option:
somajo-tokenizer -h
To tokenize a text file according to the guidelines of the EmpiriST 2015 shared task, just call the tokenizer like this:
somajo-tokenizer -c <file>
If you do not want to split camel-cased tokens, simply drop the -c
option:
somajo-tokenizer <file>
The tokenizer can also output token class information for each token, i.e. if it is a number, an emoticon, an abbreviation, etc.:
somajo-tokenizer -t <file>
If you want to be able to reconstruct the untokenized input to a certain extent, SoMaJo can also provide you with additional details for each token, i.e. if the token was followed by whitespace or if it contained internal whitespace (according to the tokenization guidelines, things like “: )” get normalized to “:)”):
somajo-tokenizer -e <file>
SoMaJo assumes that paragraphs are delimited by empty lines in the
input file. If your input file uses single newlines instead, you have
to tell that to the tokenizer via the -s or --paragraph_separator
option:
somajo-tokenizer --paragraph_separator single_newlines <file>
To speed up tokenization, you can specify the number of worker
processes used via the --parallel option:
somajo-tokenizer --parallel <number> <file>
SoMaJo can also split the input paragraphs into sentences:
somajo-tokenizer --split_sentences <file>
SoMaJo can also process XML files. Use the -x or --xml option to
tell the tokenizer that your input is an XML file:
somajo-tokenizer --xml <xml-file>
If you also want to do sentence splitting, you can use (multiple
instances of) the --tag option to specify XML tags that are always
sentence breaks, i.e. that can never occur in the middle of a
sentence. Per default, the sentence splitter uses the following list
of tags: title, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, br, div, ol, ul, dl and
table.
somajo-tokenizer --xml --split_sentences --tag h1 --tag p --tag div <xml-file>
You can easily incorporate both the tokenizer and the sentence
splitter into your own Python projects. For tokenization, you have to
import somajo.Tokenizer, create a Tokenizer object and call its
tokenize_file or tokenize_paragraph method. Sentence splitting
operates on paragraphs of tokenized text, i.e. on the output of the
tokenize methods. You have to import somajo.SentenceSplitter,
create a SentenceSplitter object and call its split method. Here is an example for tokenizing and splitting a single paragraph:
from somajo import Tokenizer, SentenceSplitter
tokenizer = Tokenizer(split_camel_case=True, token_classes=False, extra_info=False)
# set is_tuple=True if token_classes=True or extra_info=True
sentence_splitter = SentenceSplitter(is_tuple=False)
# note that paragraphs are allowed to contain newlines
paragraph = "der beste Betreuer?\n-- ProfSmith! : )"
tokens = tokenizer.tokenize_paragraph(paragraph)
print("\n".join(tokens), "\n")
sentences = sentence_splitter.split(tokens)
for sentence in sentences:
print("\n".join(sentence), "\n")
And here is an example for tokenizing and sentence splitting a whole
file. The option parsep_empty_lines=False states that paragraphs are
delimited by newlines instead of empty lines:
# If paragraphs are not separated by empty lines, specify parsep_empty_lines=False:
tokenized_paragraphs = tokenizer.tokenize_file("Beispieldatei.txt", parsep_empty_lines=False)
for paragraph in tokenized_paragraphs:
sentences = sentence_splitter.split(paragraph)
for sentence in sentences:
print("\n".join(sentence), "\n")
For processing XML data, use the tokenize_xml and split_xml methods:
# you can read from an open file object
tokens = tokenizer.tokenize_xml(file_object)
# or you can pass a string with XML data
tokens = tokenizer.tokenize_xml(xml_string, is_file=False)
print("\n".join(tokens), "\n")
eos_tags = set(["title", "h1", "p"])
sentences = sentence_splitter.split_xml(tokens, eos_tags)
for sentence in sentences:
print("\n".join(sentence), "\n")
SoMaJo was the system with the highest average F₁ score in the EmpiriST 2015 shared task. The performance of the current version on the two test sets is summarized in the following table (Training and test sets are available from the official website):
| Corpus | Precision | Recall | F₁ |
|---|---|---|---|
| CMC | 99.71 | 99.56 | 99.64 |
| Web | 99.84 | 99.92 | 99.88 |
Starting with version 1.8.0, SoMaJo can also tokenize English text. In general, we follow the “new” Penn Treebank conventions described, for example, in the guidelines for ETTB 2.0 (Mott et al., 2009) and CLEAR (Warner et al., 2012).
For tokenizing English text on the command line, specify the language
via the -l or --language option:
somajo-tokenizer -l en <file>
From Python, you can pass language="en" to the Tokenizer and
SentenceSplitter constructors, e.g.:
tokenizer = Tokenizer(language="en")
tokens = tokenizer.tokenize("That aint bad!:D")
Performance of the English tokenizer:
| Corpus | Precision | Recall | F₁ |
|---|---|---|---|
| English Web Treebank | 99.63 | 99.63 | 99.63 |
-
Proisl, Thomas, Peter Uhrig (2016): “SoMaJo: State-of-the-art tokenization for German web and social media texts.” In: Proceedings of the 10th Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC-X) and the EmpiriST Shared Task. Berlin: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 57–62. PDF.
@InProceedings{Proisl_Uhrig_EmpiriST:2016, author = {Proisl, Thomas and Uhrig, Peter}, title = {{SoMaJo}: {S}tate-of-the-art tokenization for {G}erman web and social media texts}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th {W}eb as {C}orpus Workshop ({WAC-X}) and the {EmpiriST} Shared Task}, year = {2016}, address = {Berlin}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics ({ACL})}, pages = {57--62}, url = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W16-2607}, }