School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering 
INFS3208 – Cloud Computing 
Programming Assignment Task III (10 Marks) 
Task description: 
In this assignment, you are asked to write a piece of Spark code to count occurrences of verbs in the 
UN debates and find the most similar debate contents. The returned result should be the top 10 
verbs that are most frequently used in all debates and the debate that is most similar to the one 
we provide. This assignment is to test your ability to use transformation and action operations in Spark 
RDD programming and your understanding of Vector Database. You will be given three files, 
including a UN General Debates dataset (un-general-debates.csv), a verb list (all_verbs.txt) 
and a verb dictionary file (verb_dict.txt). These source files are expected to be stored in a HDFS. 
You can choose either Scala or Python to complete this assignment in the Jupyter Notebook. There are 
some technical requirements in your code submission as follows: 
 
Objectives: 
1. Read Source Files from HDFS and Create RDDs (1.5 marks): 
• Read the UN General Debates dataset (un-general-debates.csv) from HDFS and 
convert only the “text” column into an RDD. Details of un-general-debates.csv are 
provided in the Preparation section below (1 mark). 
• Read the verb list file (all_verbs.txt) and verb dictionary file (verb_dict.txt) from 
HDFS and load them into separate RDDs (0.5 marks). 
• Note: If you failed to read files from HDFS, you can still read them from the local file 
system in work/nbs/ and complete the following tasks. 
2. Use Learned RDD Operations to Preprocess the Debate Texts (3 marks): 
• Remove empty lines (0.5 marks). 
• Remove punctuations that could attach to the verbs (0.5 marks). 
o E.g., “work,” and “work” will be counted differently, if you DO NOT remove the 
punctuation. 
• Change the capitalization or case of text (0.5 marks). 
o E.g., “WORK”, “Work” and “work” will be counted as three different verbs, if you 
DO NOT make all of them in lower-case. 
• Find all verbs in the RDD by matching the words in the given verb list (all_verbs.txt) 
(0.5 mark). 
• Convert all verbs in different tenses into the simple present tense by looking up the 
verbs in the verb dictionary list (verb_dict.txt) (1 mark). 
o E.g., regular verb: “work” - works”, “worked”, and “working”. 
o E.g., irregular verb: “begin” - “begins”, “began”, and “begun”. o E.g., linking verb “be” and its various forms, including “is”, “am”, “are”, “was”, 
“were”, “being” and “been”. 
o E.g., (work, 100), (works,50), (working,150) should be counted as (work, 300). 
3. Use learned RDD Operations to Count Verb Frequency (3 marks): 
• Count the top 10 frequently used verbs in UN debates (2 marks). 
• Display the results in the format (“verb1”, count1), (“verb2”, count2), … and in a 
descending order of the counts (1 marks). 
4. Use Vector Database (Faiss) to Find the Most Similar Debate (2.5 marks): 
• Convert the original debates into vectors and store them in a proper Index (1.5 mark). 
• Search the debate content that has the most similar idea to “Global climate change is 
both a serious threat to our planet and survival.” (1 mark) 
 
 
Preparation: 
In this individual coding assignment, you will apply your knowledge of Vector Database, Spark, Spark 
RDD Programming and HDFS (in Lectures 7-10). Firstly, you should read Task Description to 
understand what the task is and what the technical requirements include. Secondly, you should review 
the creation and usage of Faiss, transformations and actions in Spark, and usage of HDFS in Lectures 
and Practicals 7-10. In the Appendix, there are some transformation and action operations you could 
use in this assignment. Lastly, you need to write the code (Scala or Python) in the Jupyter Notebook. 
All technical requirements need to be fully met to achieve full marks. You can either practise on 
the GCP’s VM or your local machine with Oracle Virtualbox if you are unable to access GCP. Please 
read the Example of writing Spark code below to have more details. 
 
 
Assignment Submission: 
 You need to compress only the Jupyter Notebook (.ipynb) file. 
 The name of the compressed file should be named “FirstName_LastName_StudentNo.zip”. 
 You must make an online submission to Blackboard before 3:00 PM on Friday, 11/10/2024 
 Only one extension application could be approved due to medical conditions. 
 
 
Main Steps: 
Step 1: 
Log in your VM instance and change to your home directory. We recommend using a VM instance 
with at least 4 vCPUs, 8G memory and 20GB free disk space. 
 
Step 2: 
git clone https://github.com/csenw/cca3.git && cd cca3 
Run these commands to download the required docker-compose.yml file and configuration files. Step 3: 
sudo chmod -R 777 nbs/ 
docker-compose up -d 
Run all the containers using docker-compose 
 
 
 
Step 4: 
Open the Jupyter Notebook (http://external_IP:8888) and you can find all the files under the 
work/nbs/ folder. This is also the folder where you should write the notebook (.ipynb) file. 
 
 Step 5: 
docker ps 
docker exec <container_id> hdfs dfs -put /home/nbs/all_verbs.txt /all_verbs.txt 
docker exec <container_id> hdfs dfs -put /home/nbs/verb_dict.txt /verb_dict.txt 
docker exec <container_id> hdfs dfs -put /home/nbs/un-general-debates.csv /ungeneral-debates.csv

Run the above commands to put the three source files into HDFS. Substitute <container_id> with 
your namenode container ID. After that, you should see the three files from HDFS web interface at 
http://external_IP/explorer.html 
 
 
Step 6: 
The un-general-debates.csv is a dataset that includes the text of each country’s statement from 
the general debate, separated by “country”, “session”, “year” and “text”. This dataset includes over 
forty years of data from different countries, which allows for the exploration of differences between 
countries and over time [1,2]. It is organized in the following format: 
 
In this assignment, we only consider the “text” column. 
The verb_dict.txt file contains different tenses of each verb, separated by commas. The first word 
is the simple present tense of the verb. 
 The all_verbs.txt file contains all the verbs. 
 
 
Step 7: 
Create a Jupyter Notebook to complete the programming objectives. 
We provide some intermediate output samples below. Please note that these outputs are NOT answers 
and may vary from your outputs due to different implementations and different Spark behaviours. 
• Intermediate output sample 1, take only verbs: 
 
 
• Intermediate output sample 2, top 10 verb counts (without converting verb tenses): 
 
 • Intermediate output sample 3, most similar debate: 
 
You are free to use your own implementation. However, your result should reasonably reflect the top 
10 verbs that are most frequently used in UN debates, and the most similar debate contents to the 
sentence “Global climate change is both a serious threat to our planet and survival.” 
 
 
Reference: 
[1] UN General Debates, https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/unitednations/un-general-debates. 
[2] Alexander Baturo, Niheer Dasandi, and Slava Mikhaylov, "Understanding State Preferences With 
Text As Data: Introducing the UN General Debate Corpus". Research & Politics, 2017. 
 
 Appendix: 
Transformations: 
Transformation Meaning 
map(func) Return a new distributed dataset formed by passing each element of the 
source through a function func. 
filter(func) Return a new dataset formed by selecting those elements of the source on 
which funcreturns true. 
flatMap(func) Similar to map, but each input item can be mapped to 0 or more output 
items (so funcshould return a Seq rather than a single item). 
union(otherDataset) Return a new dataset that contains the union of the elements in the source 
dataset and the argument. 
intersection(otherDataset) Return a new RDD that contains the intersection of elements in the source 
dataset and the argument. 
distinct([numPartitions])) Return a new dataset that contains the distinct elements of the source 
dataset. 
groupByKey([numPartitions]) When called on a dataset of (K, V) pairs, returns a dataset of (K, 
Iterable<V>) pairs. 
Note: If you are grouping in order to perform an aggregation (such as a 
sum or average) over each key, using reduceByKey or aggregateByKey will 
yield much better performance. 
Note: By default, the level of parallelism in the output depends on the 
number of partitions of the parent RDD. You can pass an 
optional numPartitions argument to set a different number of tasks. 
reduceByKey(func, 
[numPartitions]) 
When called on a dataset of (K, V) pairs, returns a dataset of (K, V) pairs 
where the values for each key are aggregated using the given reduce 
function func, which must be of type (V,V) => V. Like in groupByKey, the 
number of reduce tasks is configurable through an optional second 
argument. 
sortByKey([ascending], 
[numPartitions]) 
When called on a dataset of (K, V) pairs where K implements Ordered, 
returns a dataset of (K, V) pairs sorted by keys in ascending or descending 
order, as specified in the boolean ascending argument. 
join(otherDataset, 
[numPartitions]) 
When called on datasets of type (K, V) and (K, W), returns a dataset of (K, 
(V, W)) pairs with all pairs of elements for each key. Outer joins are 
supported through leftOuterJoin, rightOuterJoin, and fullOuterJoin. 
 
 Actions: 
Action Meaning 
reduce(func) Aggregate the elements of the dataset using a function func (which takes 
two arguments and returns one). The function should be commutative 
and associative so that it can be computed correctly in parallel. 
collect() Return all the elements of the dataset as an array at the driver program. 
This is usually useful after a filter or other operation that returns a 
sufficiently small subset of the data. 
count() Return the number of elements in the dataset. 
first() Return the first element of the dataset (similar to take(1)). 
take(n) Return an array with the first n elements of the dataset. 
countByKey() Only available on RDDs of type (K, V). Returns a hashmap of (K, Int) pairs 
with the count of each key. 
foreach(func) Run a function func on each element of the dataset. This is usually done 
for side effects such as updating an Accumulator or interacting with 
external storage systems. 
Note: modifying variables other than Accumulators outside of 
the foreach() may result in undefined behavior. See Understanding 
closures for more details. 
 
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