Build your own NLP based search engine Using BM25

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon.

Introduction

Ever wondered how these search engines like Google and Yahoo work. And ever thought about how can they scan all through the internet and return relevant results in just About 5,43,00,000 results (0.004seconds). Well, they work on the concept of Crawling and Indexing.

• Crawling: Automated bots looks for pages that are new or updated. And stores the key information like — URL, title, keywords, and so on from the pages to be used later.
• Indexing: Data captured from crawling is analyzed like — what the page is about. Key content, images, and video files on the page are used in the process. This information is indexed and stored to be returned later for a search query.

Hence, whenever we asked them to search anything for us they are not scanning through the length and breadth of the internet but just scanning through those indexed URLs in step 2.

Well, today we would work on how to develop a small prototype, very similar to the indexing functionality of any search engine. We would be using a tweets dataset on #COVID and try to index them based on our search term.

A. Importing packages

import pandas as pd
from rank_bm25 import *

What is BM25?

BM25 is a simple Python package and can be used to index the data, tweets in our case, based on the search query. It works on the concept of TF/IDF i.e.

• TF or Term Frequency — Simply put, indicates the number of occurrences of the search term in our tweet
• IDF or Inverse Document Frequency — It measures how important your search term is. Since TF considers all terms equally important, thus, we can’t only use term frequencies to calculate the weight of a term in your text. We would need to weigh down the frequent terms while scaling up the rare terms showing their relevancy to the tweet.

Once you run the query, BM25 will show the relevancy of your search term with each of the tweets. You can sort it to index the most relevant ones.

B. Preparing your tweets

Since this is not a discussion on Twitter API, will start using an excel based feed. You can clean your text data on these key steps to make the search more robust.

       1. Tokenization: 

Splitting the sentence into words. So that each word can be considered uniquely.

      2. Removing special characters:

Removing the special characters from your tweets

def spl_chars_removal(lst):
    lst1=list()
    for element in lst:
        str=””
        str = re.sub(“[⁰-9a-zA-Z]”,” “,element)
        lst1.append(str)
    return lst1

     3. Removing stop words:

Stop words are commonly used words (is, for, the, etc.) in the tweets. These words do not signify any importance as they do not help in distinguishing two tweets. I used Gensim package to remove my stopwords, you can also try it using nltk, but I found Gensim much faster than others.

One can also easily add new words to the stop words list, in case your data is particularly surrounded with those words and is frequently occurring.

#adding words to stopwords
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from gensim.parsing.preprocessing import STOPWORDS

#adding custom words to the pre-defined stop words list
all_stopwords_gensim = STOPWORDS.union(set([‘disease’]))

def stopwprds_removal_gensim_custom(lst):
    lst1=list()
    for str in lst:
        text_tokens = word_tokenize(str)
        tokens_without_sw = [word for word in text_tokens if not word in all_stopwords_gensim]
        str_t = “ “.join(tokens_without_sw)
        lst1.append(str_t)
 
    return lst1

     4. Normalization:

 Text normalization is the process of transforming a text into a canonical (standard) form. For example, the word “gooood” and “gud” can be transformed to “good”, its canonical form. Another example is mapping of near-identical words such as “stopwords”, “stop-words” and “stop words” to just “stopwords”.

This technique is important for noisy texts such as social media comments, text messages, and comments to blog posts where abbreviations, misspellings, and use of out-of-vocabulary words (oov) are prevalent. People tend to write comments in short-hand and hence this pre-processing becomes very important.

    5. Stemming:

Process of transforming the words to their root form. It’s the process of reducing inflection in words (e.g. troubled, troubles) to their root form (e.g. trouble). The “root” in this case may not be a real root word, but just a canonical form of the original word.

Stemming uses a heuristic process that chops off the ends of words in the hope of correctly transforming words into their root form. It needs to be reviewed as in the below example you can see “Machine” gets transformed to “Machin”, “e” is chopped off in the stemming process.

import nltk
from nltk.stem
import PorterStemmer
ps = PorterStemmer() sentence = “Machine Learning is cool”
for word in sentence.split():
    print(ps.stem(word))

C. Tokenizing tweets and running BM25

This is the central piece where we run the query for search. We search the tweets based on the word “vaccine” user-based. One can enter a phrase too and it will fluently as we tokenize our search term in the 2nd line below.

You can check the association of each tweet with your search term using .get_scores function.

doc_scores = bm25.get_scores(tokenized_query)
print(doc_scores)

As we enter n=5 in .get_top_n we would get five most associated tweets as our result. You can put the value of n according to your needs.

D. Top Five associated Tweets

E. Additional use cases of BM25

There can be many use cases where a search feature is required. One of the most relevant ones is around parsing the PDF and developing a search function over the PDF content.

This is one of the widely used cases for BM25. As the globe slowly shifts to better data strategy and efficient storage techniques, the old PDF documents can be retrieved efficiently using algorithms like BM25.

Hope you enjoyed reading this and find this helpful. Thank you, folks!

Reference Links

• BM25 Journal
• Pre-Processing for NLP
• Normalization Process on Twitter data
• Google Search Engine

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