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Reported Speech

The eds.reported_speech pipeline uses a simple rule-based algorithm to detect spans that relate to reported speech (eg when the doctor quotes the patient). It was designed at AP-HP's EDS.

Usage

The following snippet matches a simple terminology, and checks whether the extracted entities are part of a reported speech. It is complete and can be run as is.

import spacy

nlp = spacy.blank("fr")
nlp.add_pipe("eds.sentences")
# Dummy matcher
nlp.add_pipe(
    "eds.matcher",
    config=dict(terms=dict(patient="patient", alcool="alcoolisé")),
)
nlp.add_pipe("eds.reported_speech")

text = (
    "Le patient est admis aux urgences ce soir pour une douleur au bras. "
    "Il nie être alcoolisé."
)

doc = nlp(text)

doc.ents
# Out: (patient, alcoolisé)

doc.ents[0]._.reported_speech
# Out: False

doc.ents[1]._.reported_speech
# Out: True

Configuration

The pipeline can be configured using the following parameters :

Parameter Explanation Default
attr spaCy attribute to match on (eg NORM, TEXT, LOWER) "NORM"
pseudo Pseudo-reported speech patterns None (use pre-defined patterns)
preceding Preceding reported speech patterns None (use pre-defined patterns)
following Following reported speech patterns None (use pre-defined patterns)
termination Termination patterns (for syntagma/proposition extraction) None (use pre-defined patterns)
verbs Patterns for verbs that imply a reported speech None (use pre-defined patterns)
on_ents_only Whether to qualify pre-extracted entities only True
within_ents Whether to look for reported speech within entities False
explain Whether to keep track of the cues for each entity False

Declared extensions

The eds.reported_speech pipeline declares two spaCy extensions, on both Span and Token objects :

  1. The reported_speech attribute is a boolean, set to True if the pipeline predicts that the span/token is reported.
  2. The reported_speech_ property is a human-readable string, computed from the reported_speech attribute. It implements a simple getter function that outputs DIRECT or REPORTED, depending on the value of reported_speech.

Authors and citation

The eds.reported_speech pipeline was developed by AP-HP's Data Science team.

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