[ AI  Python  DataNinja  ]

When you work with text data, you often want to split it into training and test sets. This is something very usual in machine learning and also in deep learning´s natural language processing. The problem is that you have to split the data in a way that is consistent with the training and test sets, but at the same time you want to keep your data consistent.

iob_train_test_split

NOTE: img source

When working with Named Entity Recognition (NER) you tipically work with IOB format. This is a very common format of tagging words in text data. But this comes with a problem…the data is stored in a very rudimentary and old way…the IOB format:

IOB – Inside-Outside-Beginning

  • B-tag -> token is beginning of a chunk
  • I-tag -> token is inside a chunk.
  • O-tag -> token belongs to no chunk.

So you basically have a single line per word and each sample (phrase in our case) will be delimited by an empty “\n”.

Last B-DATE
year I-DATE
, O
8.3 B-QUANTITY
million I-QUANTITY
passengers O
flew O
the O
airline O
, O
down O
4 B-PERCENT
percent I-PERCENT
from O
2007 B-DATE
. O

Everyone O
knows O
about O
ADT, B-ORG
longtime O
home O
security O
system O
provider O
in O
the B-GPE
U.S. I-GPE

Here you will find a simple example of how to split a dataset into training and test sets:

Enjoy!