In this tutorial we will use Keras to classify duplicated questions from Quora. The dataset first appeared in the Kaggle competition Quora Question Pairs. The dataset consists of ~400k pairs of questions and a column indicating if the question pair is duplicated.

Our implementation is inspired by the Siamese Recurrent Architecture, Mueller et al. Siamese recurrent architectures for learning sentence similarity, with small modifications like the similarity measure and the embedding layers (The original paper uses pre-trained word vectors). Using this kind of architecture dates back to 2005 with Le Cun et al and is usefull for verification tasks. The idea is to learn a function that maps input patterns into a target space such that a similarity measure in the target space approximates the “semantic” distance in the input space.

After the competition, Quora also described their approach to this problem in this blog post.

library(readr)
library(keras)
library(purrr)

FLAGS <- flags(
flag_integer("vocab_size", 50000),
flag_integer("embedding_size", 256),
flag_numeric("regularization", 0.0001),
flag_integer("seq_embedding_size", 512)
)

quora_data <- get_file(
"quora_duplicate_questions.tsv",
"http://qim.ec.quoracdn.net/quora_duplicate_questions.tsv"
)

# Pre-processing ----------------------------------------------------------

tokenizer <- text_tokenizer(num_words = FLAGS$vocab_size) fit_text_tokenizer(tokenizer, x = c(df$question1, df$question2)) question1 <- texts_to_sequences(tokenizer, df$question1)
question2 <- texts_to_sequences(tokenizer, df$question2) question1 <- pad_sequences(question1, maxlen = FLAGS$max_len_padding, value = FLAGS$vocab_size + 1) question2 <- pad_sequences(question2, maxlen = FLAGS$max_len_padding, value = FLAGS$vocab_size + 1) # Model Definition -------------------------------------------------------- input1 <- layer_input(shape = c(FLAGS$max_len_padding))
input2 <- layer_input(shape = c(FLAGS$max_len_padding)) embedding <- layer_embedding( input_dim = FLAGS$vocab_size + 2,
output_dim = FLAGS$embedding_size, input_length = FLAGS$max_len_padding,
embeddings_regularizer = regularizer_l2(l = FLAGS$regularization) ) seq_emb <- layer_lstm( units = FLAGS$seq_embedding_size,
recurrent_regularizer = regularizer_l2(l = FLAGS$regularization) ) vector1 <- embedding(input1) %>% seq_emb() vector2 <- embedding(input2) %>% seq_emb() out <- layer_dot(list(vector1, vector2), axes = 1) %>% layer_dense(1, activation = "sigmoid") model <- keras_model(list(input1, input2), out) model %>% compile( optimizer = "adam", loss = "binary_crossentropy", metrics = list( acc = metric_binary_accuracy ) ) # Model Fitting ----------------------------------------------------------- set.seed(1817328) val_sample <- sample.int(nrow(question1), size = 0.1*nrow(question1)) model %>% fit( list(question1[-val_sample,], question2[-val_sample,]), df$is_duplicate[-val_sample],
batch_size = 128,
epochs = 30,
validation_data = list(
list(question1[val_sample,], question2[val_sample,]), df\$is_duplicate[val_sample]
),
callbacks = list(
callback_early_stopping(patience = 5),
callback_reduce_lr_on_plateau(patience = 3)
)
)

save_model_hdf5(model, "model-question-pairs.hdf5", include_optimizer = TRUE)
save_text_tokenizer(tokenizer, "tokenizer-question-pairs.hdf5")

# Prediction --------------------------------------------------------------
# In a fresh R session:
# Load model and tokenizer -

model <- load_model_hdf5("model-question-pairs.hdf5", compile = FALSE)

predict_question_pairs <- function(model, tokenizer, q1, q2) {

q1 <- texts_to_sequences(tokenizer, list(q1))
q2 <- texts_to_sequences(tokenizer, list(q2))

q1 <- pad_sequences(q1, 20)
q2 <- pad_sequences(q2, 20)

as.numeric(predict(model, list(q1, q2)))
}

# Getting predictions

predict_question_pairs(
model, tokenizer,
q1 = "What is the main benefit of Quora?",
q2 = "What are the advantages of using Quora?"
)