Quid 2.6.2

Quid is a tool for quotation detection in texts and can deal with common properties of quotations, for example, ellipses or inaccurate quotations.

Readme

Quid is a tool for quotation detection in two texts, called source and target. If possible, the source text should be the one that is quoted by the target text. This allows the algorithm to handle common properties of quotations, for example, ellipses or inaccurate quotations. The following is an example output:

0	52	This is a long Text and the long test goes on and on
0	45	This is a long Text [...] test goes on and on

Demo

A demo website can be found here.

Installation

pip install Quid

Usage

There are two ways to use the algorithm, in code and from the command line.

In Code

The Quid in Code Readme describes the use of Quid in code and gives an overview of the various arguments.

To use all default arguments, the most basic use would like this:

from quid.core.Quid import Quid

quid = Quid()
matches = quid.compare('file 1 content', 'file 2 content')

Command line

The quid compare command provides a command line interface to the algorithm.

To use all default arguments, the most basic command would look like this:

quid compare file_1_path file_2_path

By default, the result is returned as a json structure: List[Match]. Match stores two MatchSpans. One for the source text and one for the target text. MatchSpan stores the start and end character positions for the matching spans in the source and target text. For example:

[
  {
    "source_span": {
      "start": 0,
      "end": 52,
      "text": "This is a long Text and the long test goes on and on"
    },
    "target_span": {
      "start": 0,
      "end": 45,
      "text": "This is a long Text [...] test goes on and on"
    }
  }
]

Alternatively, the result can be printed in a human-readable text format with the command line option --output-type text. This will result in the following output:

0	52	This is a long Text and the long test goes on and on
0	45	This is a long Text [...] test goes on and on 

In case the matching text is not needed, the option --no-text allows to exclude the text from the output.

There are more command line options which are described in the Command Line Readme.

Parallel processing

Quid supports using multiple processes when comparing multiple target texts with the source texts. To use multiple processes the command line option --max-num-processes is used. The default is 1.

Processing "long" texts

Depending on the length of the texts and the hardware used, processing times can get quite long. For texts longer than a couple of hundreds of thousands characters, it can make sense to use the --split-long-texts command line option (or split_long_texts argument) and set --max-num-processes (or max_num_processes argument) to define the number of parallel processes to be used. If --split-long-texts is used, texts longer than the default of 30000 tokens will be split. This limit can also be changed using the --split-length command line option (or split_length argument). When run from the command line, using --split-long-texts automatically shows a progress bar. To show a progress bar when using Quid in code, the show_progress argument can be set to True.

Note: --split-long-texts does not work in combination with comparing multiple target texts (i.e. passing a folder as target-path).

Passager

The package passager contains code to extract key passages from the found matches. The passage command produces several json files. The resulting data structure is documented in the data structure readme.

The passager readme contains more information on command line options.

Visualization

The package visualization contains code to create the content for a web page to visualize the key passages. For a white label version of the website, see QuidEx-wh.

The visualizer readme contains more information on command line options.

Logging

By default, the log level is set to WARN. This can be changed with the --log-level command line option. For example:

quid --log-level INFO compare …

Performance

For in-depth information on the evaluation, see our paper below. Performance of the current version of Quid is as follows:

Work	Precision	Recall	F-Score
Die Judenbuche	0.83	0.92	0.87
Micheal Kohlhaas	0.71	0.93	0.81

History

Quid was formerly known as Lotte and later renamed. Earlier publications use the name Lotte.

Data

All data, which can be made available, can be found here. Due to copyright restrictions, it is unfortunately not possible to publish the complete scholarly works.

Citation

If you use Quid or base your work on our code, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{arnold2021lotte,
  title = {{L}otte and {A}nnette: {A} {F}ramework for {F}inding and {E}xploring {K}ey {P}assages in {L}iterary {W}orks},
  author = {Arnold, Frederik and Jäschke, Robert},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {NLP Association of India (NLPAI)},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.nlp4dh-1.7},
  pages = {55--63}
}

Acknowledgements

The algorithm is inspired by sim_text by Dick Grune ^1 and Similarity texter: A text-comparison web tool based on the “sim_text” algorithm by Sofia Kalaidopoulou (2016) ^2