Procrustes (Gk. Προκρούστης)

Procrustes is a script for projecting annotations of various kinds from one text to another highly similar text (e.g., with different tokenization or differences in punctuation or encoding of punctuation). (It was named long before the word embedding alignment method!)

Usage

procrustes.py [-h] [--cost-function COST_FUNCTION] [--flip] [--mode MODE] [--output OUTPUT] [--processes PROCESSES] [--segmenter SEGMENTER] [--verbose] [--zipper ZIPPER] source target

By default, Procrustes requires two arguments. Those options are the source and target for alignment. Each of these should be a filepath. The source file should contain the labeled data, whereas the target file should contain the unlabeled data. Currently, Procrustes only accepts either two files (where the two files are aligned) or two directories (where complete files are aligned). In either case, Procrustes requires that source and target files have the same number of lines. This requirement can be fulfilled without manual reformatting if an appropriate --zipper function is used to preprocess the data.

In terms of optional arguments:

• the --cost-function option allows for an alignment function to be selected. Alignments are done on the basis of edit distance, although different cost functions can be defined to produce results which fit better with the differences displayed by variations on the same data. The default is the procrustes-levenshtein cost function.
• the --flip flag allows source and target to be reversed. However, this is currently only implemented for the word-level alignment mode.
• the --mode option allows for one to select the type of alignment that should occur, dictating the expected label format. (See below for more details.)
• the --output option allows for a filepath to be supplied such that the result of the alignment (i.e., the target data with the source labels applied to it) is written to a file (or files).
• the --processes option allows for the number of processes desired to be specified, permitting multiprocessing. It is only used when independent files are being aligned.
• the --segmenter option determines how the alignment output will be split up and formatted as a postprocessing step. This currently is only used for the XML alignment model.
• the --verbose option prints out intermediate alignment results (e.g., individual lines for alignment across a single file).
• the --zipper option determines how the supplied data from source and target will be compared; can be done line-by-line or in aggregate (e.g., alignment on the level of the whole file).

Modes

Procrustes contains three modes of alignment. Below, we list those modes and describe the expected formats for each of them.

• In Tree mode (default or --mode tree), source should contain Treebank-style trees, one per line. Not implemented. (It had been implemented in a previous version, but it was lost.)

• In XML mode (--mode xml), source should be in XML.

• In Word mode (--mode word), source should have the format:

  τοὺς πόδας προέκρουεν \t he stretched their legs \t 0-2 1-3 2-0 2-1
  

  where the words are numbered starting from 0. By default, the source (here, Greek) side is the one that will be forced to match the target; as mentioned above, the --flip flag changes the target (here, English) side instead.