Syntactic N-grams as machine learning features for natural language processing

Grigori Sidorov, Francisco Velasquez, Efstathios Stamatatos, Alexander Gelbukh, Liliana Chanona-Hernández

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

218 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper we introduce and discuss a concept of syntactic n-grams (sn-grams). Sn-grams differ from traditional n-grams in the manner how we construct them, i.e., what elements are considered neighbors. In case of sn-grams, the neighbors are taken by following syntactic relations in syntactic trees, and not by taking words as they appear in a text, i.e., sn-grams are constructed by following paths in syntactic trees. In this manner, sn-grams allow bringing syntactic knowledge into machine learning methods; still, previous parsing is necessary for their construction. Sn-grams can be applied in any natural language processing (NLP) task where traditional n-grams are used. We describe how sn-grams were applied to authorship attribution. We used as baseline traditional n-grams of words, part of speech (POS) tags and characters; three classifiers were applied: support vector machines (SVM), naive Bayes (NB), and tree classifier J48. Sn-grams give better results with SVM classifier.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)853-860
Number of pages8
JournalExpert Systems with Applications
Volume41
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014

Keywords

  • Authorship attribution
  • Classification features
  • J48
  • NB
  • Parsing
  • SVM
  • Syntactic n-grams
  • Syntactic paths
  • sn-Grams

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