library("knitr") knitr::opts_chunk$set(comment = "#>", collapse = TRUE)
Microsoft Cognitive Services -- formerly known as Project Oxford -- are a set of APIs, SDKs and services that developers can use to add AI features to their apps. Those features include emotion and video detection; facial, speech and vision recognition; as well as speech and NLP.
Note: A test/demo Shiny web application is available here.
Per Microsoft's website, the Text Analytics REST API is a suite of text analytics web services built with Azure Machine Learning that can be used to analyze unstructured text. The API supports the following operations:
The API returns a numeric score between 0 and 1. Scores close to 1 indicate positive sentiment and scores close to 0 indicate negative sentiment. Sentiment score is generated using classification techniques. The input features of the classifier include n-grams, features generated from part-of-speech tags, and word embeddings. English, French, Spanish and Portuguese text are supported.
This API returns the detected topics for a list of submitted text records. A topic is identified with a key phrase, which can be one or more related words. This API requires a minimum of 100 text records to be submitted, but is designed to detect topics across hundreds to thousands of records. The API is designed to work well for short, human-written text such as reviews and user feedback. English is the only language supported at this time.
This API returns the detected language and a numeric score between 0 and 1. Scores close to 1 indicate 100% certainty that the identified language is correct. A total of 120 languages are supported.
This API returns a list of strings denoting the key talking points in the input text. English, German, Spanish, and Japanese text are supported.
To use the {mscstexta4r}
R package, you MUST have a valid account
with Microsoft Cognitive Services. Once you have an account, Microsoft will
provide you with an API key
listed under your subscriptions. After you've configured {mscstexta4r}
with
your API key, you will be able to call the Text Analytics REST API from R, up
to your maximum number of transactions per month and per minute.
You can install the latest stable version of {mscstexta4r}
from CRAN as
follows:
if ("mscstexta4r" %in% installed.packages()[,"Package"] == FALSE) { install.packages("mscstexta4r") }
You can also install the development version using {devtools}
:
if ("mscstexta4r" %in% installed.packages()[,"Package"] == FALSE) { if ("devtools" %in% installed.packages()[,"Package"] == FALSE) { install.packages("devtools") } devtools::install_github("philferriere/mscstexta4r") }
After loading {mscstexta4r}
with library()
, you must call textaInit()
before you can call any of the core {mscstexta4r}
functions.
The textaInit()
configuration function will first check to see if the variable
MSCS_TEXTANALYTICS_CONFIG_FILE
exists in the system environment. If it does,
the package will use that as the path to the configuration file.
If MSCS_TEXTANALYTICS_CONFIG_FILE
doesn't exist, it will look for the file
.mscskeys.json
in the current user's home directory (that's ~/.mscskeys.json
on Linux, and something like C:\Users\Phil\Documents\.mscskeys.json
on
Windows). If the file is found, the package will load the API key and URL from
it.
If using a file, please make sure it has the following structure:
{ "textanalyticsurl": "https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/texta/analytics/v2.0/", "textanalyticskey": "...MSCS Text Analytics API key goes here..." }
If no configuration file is found, textaInit()
will attempt to pick up its
configuration from two Sys env variables instead:
MSCS_TEXTANALYTICS_URL
- the URL for the Text Analytics REST API.
MSCS_TEXTANALYTICS_KEY
- your personal Text Analytics REST API key.
textaInit()
needs to be called only once, after package load.
The MSCS Text Analytics API is a RESTful API. HTTP requests over a network and the Internet can fail. Because of congestion, because the web site is down for maintenance, because of firewall configuration issues, etc. There are many possible points of failure.
The API can also fail if you've exhausted your call volume quota or are exceeding the API calls rate limit. Unfortunately, MSCS does not expose an API you can query to check if you're about to exceed your quota for instance. The only way you'll know for sure is by looking at the error code returned after an API call has failed.
To help with error handling, we recommend the systematic use of tryCatch()
when calling {mscstexta4r}
core functions. Its mechanism may appear a bit
daunting at first, but it is well documented.
We've also included many examples, as you'll see below.
All but one core text analytics functions execute exclusively in synchronous
mode. textaDetectTopics()
is the only function that can be executed either
synchronously or asynchronously. Why? Because topic detection is typically a
"batch" operation meant to be performed on thousands of related documents
(product reviews, research articles, etc.).
When textaDetectTopics()
executes synchronously, you must wait for it to
finish before you can move on to the next task. When textaDetectTopics()
executes asynchronously, you can move on to something else before topic
detection has completed. In the latter case, you will need to call
textaDetectTopicsStatus()
periodically yourself until the Microsoft Cognitive
Services server complete topic detection and results become available.
If you're performing topic detection in batch mode (from an R script), we
recommend using the textaDetectTopics()
in synchronous mode, in which case,
again, it will return only after topic detection has completed.
If you're calling textaDetectTopics()
in synchronous mode within the R console
REPL (interactive mode), it will appear as if the console has hanged. This
is EXPECTED. The function hasn't crashed. It is simply in "sleep mode",
activating itself periodically and then going back to sleep, until the results
have become available. In sleep mode, even though it appears "stuck",
textaDetectTopics()
doesn't use any CPU resources. While the function is
operating in sleep mode, you WILL NOT be able to use the console before the
function completes.
If you need to operate the console while topic detection is being performed by
the Microsoft Cognitive services servers, you should call textaDetectTopics()
in asynchronous mode and then call textaDetectTopicsStatus()
yourself
repeatedly afterwards, until results are available.
Here's some sample code that illustrates how to use tryCatch()
:
library('mscstexta4r') tryCatch({ textaInit() }, error = function(err) { geterrmessage() })
If {mscstexta4r}
cannot locate .mscskeys.json
nor any of the configuration
environment variables, the code above will generate the following output:
[1] "mscstexta4r: could not load config info from Sys env nor from file"
Similarly, textaInit()
will fail if {mscstexta4r}
cannot find the
textanalyticskey
key in .mscskeys.json
, or fails to parse it correctly,
etc. This is why it is so important to use tryCatch()
with all {mscstexta4r}
functions.
The core API calls exposed by {mscstexta4r}
are the following:
# Perform sentiment analysis textaSentiment( documents, # Input sentences or documents languages = rep("en", length(documents)) # "en"(English, default)|"es"(Spanish)|"fr"(French)|"pt"(Portuguese) )
# Detect top topics in group of documents textaDetectTopics( documents, # At least 100 documents (English only) stopWords = NULL, # Stop word list (optional) topicsToExclude = NULL, # Topics to exclude (optional) minDocumentsPerWord = NULL, # Threshold to exclude rare topics (optional) maxDocumentsPerWord = NULL, # Threshold to exclude ubiquitous topics (optional) resultsPollInterval = 30L, # Poll interval (in s, default: 30s, use 0L for async) resultsTimeout = 1200L, # Give up timeout (in s, default: 1200s = 20mn) verbose = FALSE # If set to TRUE, print every poll status to stdout )
# Detect languages used in documents textaDetectLanguages( documents, # Input sentences or documents numberOfLanguagesToDetect = 1L # Default: 1L )
# Get key talking points in documents textaKeyPhrases( documents, # Input sentences or documents languages = rep("en", length(documents)) # "en"(English, default)|"de"(German)|"es"(Spanish)|"fr"(French)|"ja"(Japanese) )
The functions textaDetectTopics()
returns a S3 class object of the class
textatopics
. The textatopics
object exposes formatted results using several
dataframes (documents and their IDs, topics and their IDs, which topics are
assigned to which documents), the REST API JSON response (should you care),
and the HTTP request (mostly for debugging purposes).
The other functions return S3 class objects of the class texta
. The texta
object exposes results collected in a single data.frame
, the REST API JSON
response, and the original HTTP request.
The following code snippets illustrate how to use {mscstexta4r} functions and show what results they return with toy examples. If after reviewing this code there is still confusion regarding how and when to use each function, please refer to the original documentation.
docsText <- c( "Loved the food, service and atmosphere! We'll definitely be back.", "Very good food, reasonable prices, excellent service.", "It was a great restaurant.", "If steak is what you want, this is the place.", "The atmosphere is pretty bad but the food is quite good.", "The food is quite good but the atmosphere is pretty bad.", "The food wasn't very good.", "I'm not sure I would come back to this restaurant.", "While the food was good the service was a disappointment.", "I was very disappointed with both the service and my entree." ) docsLanguage <- rep("en", length(docsText)) tryCatch({ # Perform sentiment analysis textaSentiment( documents = docsText, # Input sentences or documents languages = docsLanguage # "en"(English, default)|"es"(Spanish)|"fr"(French)|"pt"(Portuguese) ) }, error = function(err) { # Print error geterrmessage() })
# Load yelpChReviews100 text reviews load("./tests/testthat/data/yelpChineseRestaurantReviews100.rda") tryCatch({ # Detect top topics textaDetectTopics( documents = yelpChReviews100, # At least 100 docs/sentences (English only) stopWords = NULL, # Stop word list (optional) topicsToExclude = NULL, # Topics to exclude (optional) minDocumentsPerWord = NULL, # Threshold to exclude rare topics (optional) maxDocumentsPerWord = NULL, # Threshold to exclude ubiquitous topics (optional) resultsPollInterval = 30L, # Poll interval (in s, default: 30s, use 0L for async) resultsTimeout = 1200L, # Give up timeout (in s, default: 1200s = 20mn) verbose = FALSE # If set to TRUE, print every poll status to stdout ) }, error = function(err) { # Print error geterrmessage() })
# Load yelpChReviews100 text reviews load("./tests/testthat/data/yelpChineseRestaurantReviews100.rda") tryCatch({ # Detect top topics operation <- textaDetectTopics( documents = yelpChReviews100, # At least 100 docs/sentences (English only) resultsPollInterval = 0L # Poll interval (in s, default: 30s, use 0L for async) ) # Poll the servers ourselves, until the work completes or until we time out resultsPollInterval <- 30L resultsTimeout <- 1200L startTime <- Sys.time() endTime <- startTime + resultsTimeout while (Sys.time() <= endTime) { sleepTime <- startTime + resultsPollInterval - Sys.time() if (sleepTime > 0) Sys.sleep(sleepTime) startTime <- Sys.time() # Poll for results topics <- textaDetectTopicsStatus(operation) if (topics$status != "NotStarted" && topics$status != "Running") break; } topics }, error = function(err) { # Print error geterrmessage() }) # Same results as in synchronous mode
docsText = c( "The Louvre or the Louvre Museum is the world's largest museum.", "Le musee du Louvre est un musee d'art et d'antiquites situe au centre de Paris.", "El Museo del Louvre es el museo nacional de Francia.", "Il Museo del Louvre a Parigi, in Francia, e uno dei piu celebri musei del mondo.", "Der Louvre ist ein Museum in Paris." ) tryCatch({ # Detect languages textaDetectLanguages( documents = docsText, # Input sentences or documents numberOfLanguagesToDetect = 1L # Number of languages to detect ) }, error = function(err) { # Print error geterrmessage() })
docsText <- c( "Loved the food, service and atmosphere! We'll definitely be back.", "Very good food, reasonable prices, excellent service.", "It was a great restaurant.", "If steak is what you want, this is the place.", "The atmosphere is pretty bad but the food is quite good.", "The food is quite good but the atmosphere is pretty bad.", "I'm not sure I would come back to this restaurant.", "The food wasn't very good.", "While the food was good the service was a disappointment.", "I was very disappointed with both the service and my entree." ) docsLanguage <- rep("en", length(docsText)) tryCatch({ # Get key talking points in documents textaKeyPhrases( documents = docsText, # Input sentences or documents languages = docsLanguage # "en"(English, default)|"de"(German)|"es"(Spanish)|"fr"(French)|"ja"(Japanese) ) }, error = function(err) { # Print error geterrmessage() })
All Microsoft Cognitive Services components are Copyright (c) Microsoft.
For great introductions to the underlying REST API, please refer to this and that link.
{mscsweblm4r}
, a R Client for the Microsoft Cognitive Services Web Language
Model REST API, is also available on CRAN
Please report any issues or bugs here.
License: MIT + file
To retrieve {mscstexta4r}
citation information, run citation(package = 'mscstexta4r')
This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project, you agree to abide by its terms.
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