A minimalistic spelling- and vocabulary-based American-vs-British variety classifier.
This classifier is based on the VarCon database. First the database was read and used in its entirety, after which progressive prunings were performed to improve performance.
The classifier performs rudimentary preprocessing (some weird character deletion to reduce the odds of discarding non-important words) and then checks all lowercase nonnumerical words if they are present in the dictionary. The final step is assigning variety to the input text, for which we use the following logic:
- for documents with no identified American or British lexemes we return
UNK, - if one variant has more than twice as many identified words as the other, we classify the instance as the more frequent variant,
- else we classify it as
MIX.
Only two files are needed for this tool:
lexicon.pickle: pickled python dictionary with words and their variants,ABClf.py: main and helper functions for preprocessing and classifying.
Later a new file was added, lexicon_balanced.pickle. Balanced lexicon contains about the same amount of British and American (US) keywords, which can be more fair in some cases.
Please refer to demo.ipynb.
Another demo was prepared by Taja Kuzman and can be run on Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/tajakuz/identifying-american-british-english-variety .
Copyright 2000-2020 by Kevin Atkinson (kevina@gnu.org) and Benjamin
Titze (btitze@protonmail.ch).
Copyright 2000-2019 by Kevin Atkinson
Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this array, the
associated software, and its documentation for any purpose is hereby
granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears
in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission
notice appear in supporting documentation. Kevin Atkinson makes no
representations about the suitability of this array for any
purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
Copyright 2016 by Benjamin Titze
Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell this array, the
associated software, and its documentation for any purpose is hereby
granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appears
in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission
notice appear in supporting documentation. Benjamin Titze makes no
representations about the suitability of this array for any
purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
Since the original words lists come from the Ispell distribution:
Copyright 1993, Geoff Kuenning, Granada Hills, CA
All rights reserved.
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modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
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1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
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documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
3. All modifications to the source code must be clearly marked as
such. Binary redistributions based on modified source code
must be clearly marked as modified versions in the documentation
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(clause 4 removed with permission from Geoff Kuenning)
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