collective.classification 0.1b1

Content classification/clustering through language processing

Introduction
============

*collective.classification* aims to provide a set of tools for automatic
document classification. Currently it makes use of the
`Natural Language Toolkit`_ and features a trainable document classifier based
on Part Of Speech (POS) tagging, heavily influenced by `topia.termextract`_.
This product is mostly intended to be used for experimentation and
development. Currently english and dutch are supported.

.. _`Natural Language Toolkit`: http://www.nltk.org
.. _`topia.termextract`: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/topia.termextract/

What is this all about?
=======================

It's mostly about having fun! The package is in a very early experimental
stage and awaits eagerly contributions. You will get a good understanding of
what works or not by looking at the tests. You might also be able to do some
useful things with it:

1) Term extraction can be performed to provide quick insight on what a
document is about.
2) On a large site with a lot of content and tags (or subjects in the
plone lingo) it might be difficult to assign tags to new content. In this
case, a trained classifier could provide useful suggestions to an editor
responsible for tagging content.
3) Clustering can help you organize unclassified content into groups.

How it works?
=============

At the moment there exist the following type of utilities:

* *POS taggers*, utilities for classifying words in a document
as `Parts Of Speech`_. Two are provided at the moment, a Penn TreeBank
tagger and a trigram tagger. Both can be trained with some other language
than english which is what we do here.
* *Term extractors*, utilities responsible for extracting the important
terms from some document. The extractor we use here, assumes that in a
document only nouns matter and uses a POS tagger to find those mostly used
in a document. For details please look at the code and the tests.
* *Content classifiers*, utilities that can tag content in predefined
categories. Here, a `naive Bayes`_ classifier is used. Basically, the
classifier looks at already tagged content, performs term extraction and
trains itself using the terms and tags as an input. Then, for new content,
the classifier will provide suggestions for tags according to the
extracted terms of the content.
* *Clusterers*, utilities that without prior knowledge of content
classification can group content into groups according to feature
similarity. At the moment NLTK's `k-means`_ clusterer is used.


.. _`Parts Of Speech`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part-of-speech_tagging
.. _`naive Bayes`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier
.. _`k-means`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-means_clustering

Installation & Setup
====================

Before running buildout, make sure you have yaml and its python bindings
installed (use macports on osx, or your package installer on linux). If nltk
exists for your OS you might as well install that, otherwise it will be
fetched when you run buildout.

To get started you will simply need to add the package to your "eggs" section
and run buildout, restart your Plone instance and install the
"collective.classification" package using the quick-installer or via the
"Add-on Products" section in "Site Setup".

**WARNING: Upon first time installation linguistic data will be fetched from
NLTK's repository and stored locally on your filesystem. It's not big (about 400kb) but you need the plone user to have access to its "home". Running the
tests will also fetch more data from nltk bringing the total to about 225Mb, so not for the faint at disk space.**

How to use it?
==============
* For a parsed document you can call the term view to display the identified
terms (just append *@@terms* to the url of the content to call the view).
* In order to use the classifier and get suggested tags for some content,
you can call *@@suggest-categories* on the content. This comes down to
appending @@suggest-categories to the url in your browser. A form will
come up with suggestions, choose the ones that seem appropriate and apply.
You will need to have the right to edit the document in order to call the
view.
* For clustering you can just call the *@@clusterize* view from anywhere.
The result is not deterministic but hopefully helpful;). You need manager
rights for this so as to not allow your users to DOS your site!


Changelog
=========
0.1b1
-------------------
- Speed gain by not utilizing the PenTreeBank tagger anymore. [ggozad]
- Added multi-lingual support, starting with dutch! [ggozad]
- No need to download all the coprora anymore. [ggozad]
- A lot of refactoring. Things got moved around and a lot of unnecessary code
was removed. [ggozad]
- We now use a Brill/Trigram/Affix tagger that is pre-trained. This
allows collective.classification to ship without all the corpora. The user
can still supply a different tagger if necessary. [ggozad]
- The default nltk PenTreeBank tagger is no longer used. Too slow. [ggozad]
- npextractor is no longer a local persistent utility. Opted for a global
non-persisted object. [ggozad]
- zope.lifecycle events are now used. [ggozad]
- Gained compatibility with plone 4. [ggozad]
0.1a3
-------------------
- Introduced IClassifiable interface. ATContentTypes are now adapted to it,
and it should be easier to add other non-AT content types or customize the
adapter. [ggozad]
- Handling of IObjectRemovedEvent event. [ggozad]
- Added a form to import sample content from the brown corpus, for debugging
and testing. [ggozad]
- Added some statistics information with @@classification-stats.
Displays the number of parsed documents, as well as the most useful terms.
[ggozad]
- Added @@terms view, allowing a user to inspect the identified terms for some
content. [ggozad]
- Have to specify corpus categories when training n-gram tagger. Fixes #3 [ggozad]

0.1a2
-------------------
- Made control panel more sane. Fixes #1. [ggozad]
- NP-extractor has become a local persistent utility. [ggozad]
- Renamed @@subjectsuggest to @@suggest-categories. Fixes #2. [ggozad]
- "memoized" term extractor. [ggozad]
- Added friendly types to the control panel. [ggozad]
- Updated documentation and dependencies to warn about yaml. [ggozad]

0.1a1
-------------------

- First public release. [ggozad]