# Generating rudimentary Mind-Maps from Word2Vec models

Mind Maps are notorious for being a very powerful organizational tool for a variety of tasks, such as brainstorming, planning and problem solving. Visual (or rather, graphical) arrangement of ideas aids the thought process, and in fact mimics the way we explore our mental knowledge base while ‘thinking’. There are a lot of online tools available for drawing out mind maps, but none that can generate one. By generate, I mean coming up with the verbal content.

For the longest time (almost 8 months now), I have been tinkering with ways to combine text mining and graph theory into a framework to generate a Mind-Map (given a text document). Ofcourse, the first thing argument would be that there cannot be a single possible Mind-Map for any block of text. And its true! However, having such an automated Map as a reference while building your own, might give you more insights (especially while brainstorming), or help you remember links that you might miss out (for studying). Lets see what a Mind-Map looks like:

Two points:

i. A Mind-Map is NOT a tree that divides the overall topic into its subtopics recursively. Its infact more like a graph, that links terms that are semantically related.

ii. Like ‘Night’ might make the word ‘Day’ pop up in your mind, a mind-map may have links between opposite meaning concepts, like Thicker-Thinner in the above example.

There are of course other points like using images to enhance concepts, and so on. But thats not the point of this post (And I suck at designer-style creativity anyways). Heres an article to help you get acquainted with the process of building and using your own Mind-Maps, just in case.

In my last post, I described a method to generate a Word2Vec model from a text document (where I used Wikipedia articles as an example). I will now describe the methodology I followed to generate a rudimentary mind-map from a Wikipedia article’s Word2Vec model model.

Step 1: Figuring out the top n terms from the document

(As I mentioned in my previous post, I only use stemmed unigrams. You can of course use higher-order ngrams, but that makes things a little tricky (but more accurate, if your algorithms for n-gram generation are solid).)

Here, n denotes the number of ‘nodes’ in my Mind-Map. In my trial-and-errors, 50 is usually a good enough number. Too less means too little information, and too much would mean noisy mind-maps. You can obviously play around with different choices of n. I use the co-occurrence based technique described in this paper to list out the top n words in a document. Heres the Python code for it:


def _get_param_matrices(vocabulary, sentence_terms):
"""
Returns
=======
1. Top 300(or lesser, if vocab is short) most frequent terms(list)
2. co-occurence matrix wrt the most frequent terms(dict)
3. Dict containing Pg of most-frequent terms(dict)
4. nw(no of terms affected) of each term(dict)
"""

#Figure out top n terms with respect to mere occurences
n = min(300, len(vocabulary))
topterms = list(vocabulary.keys())
topterms.sort(key = lambda x: vocabulary[x], reverse = True)
topterms = topterms[:n]

#nw maps term to the number of terms it 'affects'
#(sum of number of terms in all sentences it
#appears in)
nw = {}
#Co-occurence values are wrt top terms only
co_occur = {}
#Initially, co-occurence matrix is empty
for x in vocabulary:
co_occur[x] = [0 for i in range(len(topterms))]

#Iterate over list of all sentences' vocabulary dictionaries
#Build the co-occurence matrix
for sentence in sentence_terms:
total_terms = sum(list(sentence.values()))
#This list contains the indices of all terms from topterms,
#that are present in this sentence
top_indices = []
#Populate top_indices
top_indices = [topterms.index(x) for x in sentence
if x in topterms]
#Update nw dict, and co-occurence matrix
for term in sentence:
nw[term] = nw.get(term, 0) + total_terms
for index in top_indices:
co_occur[term][index] += (sentence[term] *
sentence[topterms[index]])

#Pg is just nw[term]/total vocabulary of text
Pg = {}
N = sum(list(vocabulary.values()))
for x in topterms:
Pg[x] = float(nw[x])/N

def get_top_n_terms(vocabulary, sentence_terms, n=50):
"""
Returns the top 'n' terms from a block of text, in the form of a list,
from most important to least.

'vocabulary' should be a dict mapping each term to the number
of its occurences in the entire text.
'sentence_terms' should be an iterable of dicts, each denoting the
vocabulary of the corresponding sentence.
"""

#First compute the matrices
topterms, co_occur, Pg, nw = _get_param_matrices(vocabulary,
sentence_terms)

#This dict will map each term to its weightage with respect to the
#document
result = {}

N = sum(list(vocabulary.values()))
#Iterates over all terms in vocabulary
for term in co_occur:
term = str(term)
org_term = str(term)
for x in Pg:
#expected_cooccur is the expected cooccurence of term with this
#term, based on nw value of this and Pg value of the other
expected_cooccur = nw[term] * Pg[x]
#Result measures the difference(in no of terms) of expected
#cooccurence and  actual cooccurence
result[org_term] = ((co_occur[term][topterms.index(x)] -
expected_cooccur)**2/ float(expected_cooccur))

terms = list(result.keys())
terms.sort(key=lambda x: result[x],
reverse=True)

return terms[:n]



The get_top_n_terms function does the job, and I guess the docstrings and in-line comments explain how (combined with the paper, of course). If you have the patience and time, you can infact just see the entire vocabulary of your Word2Vec model and pick out those terms that you want to see in your Mind-Map. This is likely to give you the best results (but with a lot of efforts).

Step 2: Deciding the Root

The Root would be that term out of your nodes, which denotes the central idea behind your entire Mind-Map. Since the number of nodes is pretty small compared to the vocabulary, its best to pick this one out manually. OR, you could use that term which has the highest occurrence in the vocabulary, among the selected nodes. This step may require some trial and error (But then what part of data science doesn’t?).

Step 3: Generating the graph (Mind-Map)

This is of course the most crucial step, and the one I spent the most time on. First off, let me define what I call the contextual vector of a term.

Say the root of the Mind Map is ‘computer’. It is linked to the term ‘hardware’. ‘hardware’ is in turn linked to ‘keyboard’. The Word2Vec vector of ‘keyboard’ would be obtained as model[keyboard] in the Python/Gensim environment. Lets denote it with $v_{keyboard}$.

Now consider yourself in the position of someone building a Mind Map. When you think of ‘keyboard’, given the structure of what you have come up with so far, you will be thinking of it in the context of ‘computer’ and ‘hardware’. Thats why you probably won’t link ‘keyboard’ to ‘music’ (atleast not directly). This basically shows that the contextual vector for ‘keyboard’ (lets call it $v'_{keyboard}$) must be biased in its direction (since we use cosine similarity with Word2Vec models, only directions matter) towards $v_{computer}$ and $v_{hardware}$. Moreover, intuitively speaking, the influence of $v_{hardware}$ on $v'_{keyboard}$ should be greater than that of $v_{computer}$ – in essence, the influence of the context of a parent reduces as you go further and further away from it. To take this into account, I use what I call the contextual decay factor $\alpha$. Expressing it mathematically,

$v'_{computer} = v_{computer}$

$v'_{hardware} = (1 - \alpha) v_{hardware} + \alpha v'_{computer}$

$v'_{keyboard} = (1 - \alpha) v_{keyboard} + \alpha v'_{hardware}$

And so on…

Finally, to generate the actual Mind-Map, heres the algorithm I use (I hope the inline comments are enough to let you know what I have done):


from scipy.spatial.distance import cosine
from networkx import Graph

def build_mind_map(model, stemmer, root, nodes, alpha=0.2):
"""
Returns the Mind-Map in the form of a NetworkX Graph instance.

'model' should be an instance of gensim.models.Word2Vec
'nodes' should be a list of terms, included in the vocabulary of
'model'.
'root' should be the node that is to be used as the root of the Mind
Map graph.
'stemmer' should be an instance of StemmingHelper.
"""

#This will be the Mind-Map
g = Graph()

#Ensure that the every node is in the vocabulary of the Word2Vec
#model, and that the root itself is included in the given nodes
for node in nodes:
if node not in model.vocab:
raise ValueError(node + " not in model's vocabulary")
if root not in nodes:
raise ValueError("root not in nodes")

##Containers for algorithm run
#Initially, all nodes are unvisited
unvisited_nodes = set(nodes)
#Initially, no nodes are visited
visited_nodes = set([])
#The following will map visited node to its contextual vector
visited_node_vectors = {}
#Thw following will map unvisited nodes to (closest_distance, parent)
#parent will obviously be a visited node
node_distances = {}

#Initialization with respect to root
current_node = root
visited_node_vectors[root] = model[root]
unvisited_nodes.remove(root)

#Build the Mind-Map in n-1 iterations
for i in range(1, len(nodes)):
#For every unvisited node 'x'
for x in unvisited_nodes:
#Compute contextual distance between current node and x
dist_from_current = cosine(visited_node_vectors[current_node],
model[x])
#Get the least contextual distance to x found until now
distance = node_distances.get(x, (100, ''))
#If current node provides a shorter path to x, update x's
#distance and parent information
if distance[0] > dist_from_current:
node_distances[x] = (dist_from_current, current_node)

#Choose next 'current' as that unvisited node, which has the
#lowest contextual distance from any of the visited nodes
next_node = min(unvisited_nodes,
key=lambda x: node_distances[x][0])

##Update all containers
parent = node_distances[next_node][1]
del node_distances[next_node]
next_node_vect = ((1 - alpha)*model[next_node] +
alpha*visited_node_vectors[parent])
visited_node_vectors[next_node] = next_node_vect
unvisited_nodes.remove(next_node)

#visited nodes) to the NetworkX Graph instance
stemmer.original_form(next_node).capitalize())

#The new node becomes the current node for the next iteration
current_node = next_node

return g



Notes: I use NetworkX’s simple Graph-building infrastructure to do the core job of maintaining the Mind-Map (makes it easier later for visualization too). To compute cosine distance, I use SciPy. Moreover, on lines 74 and 75, I use the StemmingHelper class from my last post to include the stemmed words in their original form in the actual mind-map (instead of their stemmed versions). You can pass the StemmingHelper class directly as the parameter stemmer. On the other hand, if you aren’t using stemming at all, just remove those parts of the code on lines 4, 74, and 75.

If you look at the algorithm, you will realize that its somewhat like Dijkstra’s algorithm for single-source shortest paths, but in a different context.

Example Outputs

Now for the results. (I used PyGraphViz for simple, quick-and-dirty visualization)

Heres the Mind-Map that was generated for the Wikipedia article on Machine Learning:

One on Artificial Intellgence:

And finally, one on Psychology:

The results are similar on all the other topics I tried out. A few things I noticed:

i. I should try and involve bi-grams and trigrams too. I am pretty sure it will make the Word2Vec model itself way stronger, and thus improve the interpretation of terms with respect to the document.

ii. There are some unnecessary terms in the Mind Maps, but given the short length of the texts (compared to most text mining tasks), the Keyword extraction algorithm in the paper I mentioned before, seems really good.

iii. Maybe one could use this for brainstorming. Like you start out with a term(node) of your choice. Then, the framework suggests you terms to connect it to. Once you select one of them, you get further recommendations for it based on the context, etc. – Something like a Mind-Map helper.

Anyways, this was a long post, and thanks a lot if you stuck to the end :-). Cheers!

# Generating a Word2Vec model from a block of Text using Gensim (Python)

Word2Vec is a semantic learning framework that uses a shallow neural network to learn the representations of words/phrases in a particular text. Simply put, its an algorithm that takes in all the terms (with repetitions) in a particular document, divided into sentences, and outputs a vectorial form of each. The ‘advantage’ word2vec offers is in its utilization of a neural model in understanding the semantic meaning behind those terms. For example, a document may employ the words ‘dog’ and ‘canine’ to mean the same thing, but never use them together in a sentence. Ideally, Word2Vec would be able to learn the context and place them together in its semantic space. Most applications of Word2Vec using cosine similarity to quantify closeness. This Quora question (or rather its answers) does a good job of explaining the intuition behind it.

You would need to take the following steps to develop a Word2Vec model from a block of text (Usually, documents that are extensive and yet stick to the topic of interest with minimum ambiguity do well):

[I use Gensim’s Word2Vec API in Python to form Word2Vec models of Wikipedia articles.]

1. Obtain the text (obviously)

To obtain the Wikipedia articles, I use the Python wikipedia library. Once installed from the link, here’s how you could use it obtain all the text from an aritcle-


#'title' denotes the exact title of the article to be fetched
title = "Machine learning"
from wikipedia import page
wikipage = page(title)



You could then use wikipage.context to access the entire textual context in the form of a String. Now, incase you don’t have the exact title and want to do a search, you would do:


from wikipedia import search, page
titles = search('machine learning')
wikipage = page(titles[0])



[Tip: Store the content into a file and access it from there. This would provide you a reference later, if needed.]

2. Preprocess the text

In the context of Python, you would require an iterable that yields one iterable for each sentence in the text. The inner iterable would contain the terms in the particular sentence. A ‘term’ could be individual words like ‘machine’, or phrases(n-grams) like ‘machine learning’, or a combination of both. Coming up with appropriate bigrams/trigrams is a tricky task on its own, so I just stick to unigrams.

First of all, I remove all special characters and short lines from the article, to eliminate noise. Then, I use Porter Stemming on my unigrams, using a ‘wrapper’ around Gensim’s stemming API.


from gensim.parsing import PorterStemmer
global_stemmer = PorterStemmer()

class StemmingHelper(object):
"""
Class to aid the stemming process - from word to stemmed form,
and vice versa.
The 'original' form of a stemmed word will be returned as the
form in which its been used the most number of times in the text.
"""

#This reverse lookup will remember the original forms of the stemmed
#words
word_lookup = {}

@classmethod
def stem(cls, word):
"""
Stems a word and updates the reverse lookup.
"""

#Stem the word
stemmed = global_stemmer.stem(word)

#Update the word lookup
if stemmed not in cls.word_lookup:
cls.word_lookup[stemmed] = {}
cls.word_lookup[stemmed][word] = (
cls.word_lookup[stemmed].get(word, 0) + 1)

return stemmed

@classmethod
def original_form(cls, word):
"""
Returns original form of a word given the stemmed version,
as stored in the word lookup.
"""

if word in cls.word_lookup:
return max(cls.word_lookup[word].keys(),
key=lambda x: cls.word_lookup[word][x])
else:
return word



Refer to the code and docstrings to understand how it works. (Its pretty simple anyways). It can be used as follows-


>>> StemmingHelper.stem('learning')
'learn'
>>> StemmingHelper.original_form('learn')
'learning'



Pre-stemming, you could also use a list of stopwords to eliminate terms that occur frequently in the English language, but don’t carry much semantic meaning.

After your pre-processing, lets assume you come up with an iterable called sentences from your source of text.

3. Figure out the values for your numerical parameters

Gensim’s Word2Vec API requires some parameters for initialization. Ofcourse they do have default values, but you want to define some on your own:

i. size – Denotes the number of dimensions present in the vectorial forms. If you have read the document and have an idea of how many ‘topics’ it has, you can use that number. For sizeable blocks, people use 100-200. I use around 50 for the Wikipedia articles. Usually, you would want to repeat the initialization for different numbers of topics in a certain range, and pick the one that yields the best results (depending on your application – I will be using them to build Mind-Maps, and I usually have to try values from 20-100.). A good heuristic thats frequently used is the square-root of the length of the vocabulary, after pre-processing.

ii. min_count – Terms that occur less than min_count number of times are ignored in the calculations. This reduces noise in the semantic space. I use 2 for Wikipedia. Usually, the bigger and more extensive your text, the higher this number can be.

iii. window – Only terms hat occur within a window-neighbourhood of a term, in a sentence, are associated with it during training. The usual value is 4. Unless your text contains big sentences, leave it at that.

iv. sg – This defines the algorithm. If equal to 1, the skip-gram technique is used. Else, the CBoW method is employed. (Look at the aforementioned Quora answers). I usually use the default(1).

4. Initialize the model and use it

The model can be generated using Gensim’s API, as follows:


from gensim.models import Word2Vec
min_count = 2
size = 50
window = 4

model = Word2Vec(sentences, min_count=min_count, size=size, window=window)



Now that you have the model initialized, you can access all the terms in its vocabulary, using something like list(model.vocab.keys()). To get the vectorial representation of a particular term, use model[term]. If you have used my stemming wrapper, you could find the appropriate original form of the stemmed terms using StemmingHelper.original_form(term). Heres an example, from the Wiki article on Machine learning:


>>> vocab = list(model.vocab.keys())
>>> vocab[:10]
[u'represent', u'concept', u'founder', u'focus', u'invent', u'signific', u'abil', u'implement', u'benevol', u'hierarch']
>>> 'learn' in model.vocab
True
>>> model['learn']
array([  1.23792759e-03,   5.49776992e-03,   2.18261080e-03,
8.37465748e-03,  -6.10323064e-03,  -6.94877980e-03,
6.29429379e-03,  -7.06598908e-03,  -7.16267806e-03,
-2.78065586e-03,   7.40372669e-03,   9.68673080e-03,
-4.75220988e-03,  -8.34807567e-03,   5.25208283e-03,
8.43616109e-03,  -1.07231298e-02,  -3.88528360e-03,
-9.20894090e-03,   4.17305576e-03,   1.90116244e-03,
-1.92442467e-03,   2.74807960e-03,  -1.01113841e-02,
-3.71694425e-03,  -6.60350174e-03,  -5.90716442e-03,
3.90679482e-03,  -5.32188127e-03,   5.63300075e-03,
-5.52612450e-03,  -5.57334488e-03,  -8.51202477e-03,
-8.78736563e-03,   6.41061319e-03,   6.64879987e-03,
-3.55080629e-05,   4.81080823e-03,  -7.11903954e-03,
9.83678619e-04,   1.60697231e-03,   7.42980337e-04,
-2.12235347e-04,  -8.05167668e-03,   4.08948492e-03,
-5.48054813e-04,   8.55423324e-03,  -7.08682090e-03,
1.57684216e-03,   6.79725129e-03], dtype=float32)
>>> StemmingHelper.original_form('learn')
u'learning'
>>> StemmingHelper.original_form('hierarch')
u'hierarchical'



As you might have guessed, the vectors are NumPy arrays, and support all their functionality. Now, to compute the cosine similarity between two terms, use the similarity method. Cosine similarity is generally bounded by [-1, 1]. The corresponding ‘distance’ can be measured as 1-similarity. To figure out the terms most similar to a particular one, you can use the most_similar method.


>>> model.most_similar(StemmingHelper.stem('classification'))
[(u'spam', 0.25190210342407227), (u'metric', 0.22569453716278076), (u'supervis', 0.19861873984336853), (u'decis', 0.18607790768146515), (u'inform', 0.17607420682907104), (u'artifici', 0.16593246161937714), (u'previous', 0.16366994380950928), (u'train', 0.15940310060977936), (u'network', 0.14765430986881256), (u'term', 0.14321796596050262)]
>>> model.similarity(StemmingHelper.stem('classification'), 'supervis')
0.19861870268896875
>>> model.similarity('unsupervis', 'supervis')
-0.11546791800661522



There’s a ton of other functionality that’s supported by the class, so you should have a look at the API I gave a link to. Happy topic modelling 🙂