NLP in Driverless AI

This section describes NLP (text) processing capabilities of Driverless AI. The Driverless AI platform has the ability to support both standalone text and text with other column types as predictive features. TensorFlow based and PyTorch Transformer Architectures (for example, BERT) are used for Feature Engineering and Model Building.

For details, see:

Note

  • NLP and image use cases in Driverless benefit significantly from GPU usage.

  • To download pretrained NLP models, visit http://s3.amazonaws.com/artifacts.h2o.ai/releases/ai/h2o/pretrained/bert_models.zip. You can use the pytorch_nlp_pretrained_models_dir configuration option to specify a path to pretrained PyTorch NLP models. This can be either a path in the local file system (/path/on/server/to/bert_models_folder), a URL, or an S3 location (s3://). For example, you can set this option as follows: pytorch_nlp_pretrained_models_dir=/path/on/server/to/bert_models_folder.

NLP Feature Engineering and Modeling

NLP Feature Engineering

Pretrained PyTorch Models in Driverless AI

BERT Models

The following NLP recipes are available for a text column. A full list of NLP Transformers is available here.

  • n-gram frequency/TF-IDF followed by Truncated SVD

  • n-gram frequency/TF-IDF followed by Linear/Logistic regression

  • Word embeddings followed by CNN model (TensorFlow)

  • Word embeddings followed by BiGRU model (TensorFlow)

  • Character embeddings followed by CNN model (TensorFlow)

  • BERT/DistilBERT based embeddings for Feature Engineering (PyTorch)

  • Support for multiple Transformer Architectures (eg.BERT) as modeling algorithms (PyTorch)

In addition to these techniques, Driverless AI supports custom NLP recipes using, for example, PyTorch or Flair.

NLP Feature Naming Convention

The naming conventions of the NLP features help to understand the type of feature that has been created.

The syntax for the feature names is as follows:

[FEAT TYPE]:[COL].[TARGET_CLASS]

  • [FEAT TYPE] represents one of the following:

  • Txt – Frequency / TF-IDF of n-grams followed by Truncated SVD

  • TxtTE - Frequency / TF-IDF of n-grams followed by a Linear model

  • TextCNN_TE – Word embeddings followed by CNN model

  • TextBiGRU_TE – Word embeddings followed by Bi-directional GRU model

  • TextCharCNN_TE – Character embeddings followed by CNN model

  • [COL] represents the name of the text column.

  • [TARGET_CLASS] represents the target class for which the model predictions are made.

For example, TxtTE:text.0 equates to class 0 predictions for the text column “text” using Frequency / TF-IDF of n-grams followed by a linear model.

NLP Naming Conventions

NLP Explainers

The following is a list of available NLP explainers. For more information, refer to Explainer Recipes and NLP Plots.

Default explainers

The following NLP explainers are run by default for NLP experiments.

  • NLP LOCO Explainer: The NLP LOCO plot applies a leave-one-covariate-out (LOCO) styled approach to NLP models by removing a specific token from all text features in a record and predicting local importance without that token. The difference between the resulting score and the original score (token included) is useful when trying to determine how specific changes to text features alter the predictions made by the model.

  • NLP Partial Dependence Plot Explainer: NLP partial dependence (yellow) portrays the average prediction behavior of the Driverless AI model when an input text token is left in its respective text and not included in its respective text along with +/- 1 standard deviation bands. ICE (grey) displays the prediction behavior for an individual row of data when an input text token is left in its respective text and not included in its respective text. The text tokens are generated from TF-IDF.

Legacy explainers

The following legacy NLP explainers are not run by default for NLP experiments. You can run legacy NLP explainers by using config variables.

  • NLP Tokenizer Explainer: NLP tokenizer plot shows both the global and local importance values of each token in a corpus (a large and structured set of texts). The corpus is automatically generated from text features used by Driverless AI models prior to the process of tokenization. Local importance values are calculated by using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) as a weighting factor for each token in each row. The TF-IDF increases proportionally to the number of times a token appears in a given document and is offset by the number of documents in the corpus that contain the token.

  • NLP Vectorizer + Linear Model (VLM) Text Feature Importance Explainer: NLP Vectorizer + Linear Model (VLM) text feature importance uses TF-IDF of individual words as features from a text column of interest and builds a linear model (currently GLM) using those features and fits it to either the predicted class (binary classification) or the continuous prediction (regression) of the Driverless AI model. The coefficients of the linear model give the importance of the words. Note that by default, this explainer uses the first text column based on alphabetical order.

NLP Expert Settings

A number of configurable settings are available for NLP in Driverless AI. For more information, refer to nlp-settings in the Expert Settings topic. Also see nlp model and nlp transformer in pipeline building recipes under experiment settings.

NLP Expert Settings

An NLP Example: Sentiment Analysis

The following section provides an NLP example. This information is based on the Automatic Feature Engineering for Text Analytics blog post. A similar example using the Python Client is available in Python Client.

This example uses a classic example of sentiment analysis on tweets using the US Airline Sentiment dataset. Note that the sentiment of each tweet has been labeled in advance and that our model will be used to label new tweets. We can split the dataset into training and test (80/20) with the random split in Driverless AI. We will use the tweets in the ‘text’ column and the sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) in the ‘airline_sentiment’ column for this demo. Here are some samples from the dataset:

Example text in dataset

Once we have our dataset ready in the tabular format, we are all set to use the Driverless AI. Similar to other problems in the Driverless AI setup, we need to choose the dataset, and then specify the target column (‘airline_sentiment’).

Example experiment settings

Because we don’t want to use any other columns in the dataset, we need to click on Dropped Cols, and then exclude everything but text as shown below:

Dropping columns in the dataset

Next, we will turn on our TensorFlow NLP recipes. We can go to the Expert Settings window, NLP and turn on the following: CNN TensorFlow models, BiGRU TensorFlow models, character-based TensorFlow models or pretrained PyTorch NLP models.

Enable TensorFlow models

At this point, we are ready to launch an experiment. Text features will be automatically generated and evaluated during the feature engineering process. Note that some features such as TextCNN rely on TensorFlow models. We recommend using GPU(s) to leverage the power of TensorFlow or the PyTorch Transformer models and accelerate the feature engineering process.

Enable TensorFlow models

Once the experiment is done, users can make new predictions and download the scoring pipeline just like any other Driverless AI experiments.

Resources:

NLP Models to Production

Python scoring and C++ MOJO scoring are supported for TensorFlow and BERT models (used for feature engineering and modeling). Enable tensorflow_nlp_have_gpus_in_production parameter in config.toml to enable model deployment on GPUs.