SyntaViz is a visualization interface specifically designed for analyzing a large number of natural-language queries. SyntaViz provides a platform for browsing the ontology of user queries from a syntax-driven perspective, providing quick access to high-impact failure points of the existing intent understanding system and evidence for data-driven decisions in the development cycle.

For more details, see our demo paper "SyntaViz: Visualizing Voice Queries through a Syntax-Driven Hierarchical Ontology" at EMNLP 2018: https://aclanthology.org/volumes/D18-2/

Outline of the code

• filter_query.py: Implements all the necessary functions for processing the raw data to smaller and more manageable files. It has functions for filtering and sorting the queries based on language model-based scores.
• parse_query.py: Parses a list of queries and outputs a list of dependency parse trees. It assumes tensorflow/syntaxnet environment.
• cluster_query.py: Builds hierarchical clusters from the (dependency) parsed queries. It has functionalities to navigate into the clusters and show the contents.
• syntaviz.py: Reads the hierarchical clusters from file and displays them dynamically in a web interface.
• templates/ Contains the html skeleton for the SyntaViz server.

Logical sequence of the codes

    filter_query.py
[for preparing data]                      
         |
         |
         |
         v
    parse_query.py
[for parsing queries] 
         |
         |
         |
         v
   cluster_query.py
[for creating clusters]
         |
         |
         |
         v
   syntaviz.py    
[for creating server]

Running SyntaViz

Define variables:

DATADIR=/data/syntaviz
CODEDIR=/code/SyntaViz
PORT=5678

Running SyntaViz on a corpus of queries

0. Set up environment

Start container with SyntaxNet: docker run --rm --name syntaviz-parser -it -e CODEDIR=$CODEDIR -e DATADIR=$DATADIR -v $CODEDIR:$CODEDIR -v $DATADIR:$DATADIR -p 9030:8888 tensorflow/syntaxnet /bin/bash

Install Syntaviz:

pip install --upgrade setuptools
python setup.py install

1. Prepare data in the following format

• queries: A text file with each line representing one query in following format: ID\tquery\tlogProb\tlogFreq\tCount

e.g.,

0       i wanna change my plans its to high     1.0     1.0     1
1       please email me an alarm certificate showing that our services are current and active. 1.0     1.0     1
2       cant send outgoing email        1.0     1.0     1

• actions.pkl: A pkl file that contains a single mapping (dict object) with key=query value=action

2. Parse queries

cd /opt/tensorflow/syntaxnet
mkdir $DATADIR/parsed
python -m syntaviz.parse_query $DATADIR/queries $DATADIR/parsed/part >& parse-queries.log 2>&1 &
cat $DATADIR/parsed/part* > $DATADIR/parsed.txt

At this point, $DATADIR/parsed.txt should have the same number of lines as $DATADIR/queries.

3. Start SyntaViz server

python -m syntaviz.syntaviz $DATADIR/queries $DATADIR/parsed.txt $DATADIR/actions.pkl $PORT