ccg-nlpy 0.9.0

Light-weight NLP annotators

Run NLP tools such as Part-of-Speech tagging, Chunking, Named Entity Recognition, etc on your documents in Python with ease and breeze!

Installation

1. Make sure you have “pip” on your system.

2. Make sure you have installed Cython:

   pip install cython

3. Install:

   pip install ccg_nlpy

4. Enjoy!

Note: The package should be compatible with Python 2.6+ and Python 3.3+

Upgrading: If you want to update your package:

pip install –upgrade ccg_nlpy

If you want to upgrade upgrade it on a specific version replace pip in the command above with pip2 or pip3.

Getting Started

Here is a sample usage showing how yeezily you run our system:

from ccg_nlpy import remote_pipeline

pipeline = remote_pipeline.RemotePipeline()
doc = pipeline.doc("Hello, how are you. I am doing fine")
print(doc.get_lemma) # will produce (hello Hello) (, ,) (how how) (be are) (you you) (. .) (i I) (be am) (do doing) (fine fine)
print(doc.get_pos) # will produce (UH Hello) (, ,) (WRB how) (VBP are) (PRP you) (. .) (PRP I) (VBP am) (VBG doing) (JJ fine)

The default/easy usage has some restrictions as will deliniate in the next section. See the next section to

Api Docs: Here is the API docs of our Pipeliner module.

Structure

This tool enables you accesss CogComp pipeline in different forms. The figure below summarizes these approaches:

The figure above gives a summary of possible usages, as well as their pros and cons. Next we will go through each item and elaborate:

Remote Pipeline

In this setting, you can send annotation requests to a remote machine. Hence there is not much memory burden on your local machine. Instead all the heavy-lifting is on the remote server.

Default remote server: This is the default setting. The requests are sent to our remote server, hence requires a network connection. This option is here to demonstrate how things work, but it is not a viable solution for your big experiments since we limit the number of queries to our serve (current limit is 100 queries a day). If you are a busy nlp user, you should use any of the other options.

Starting your own (remote) server: If you have a big (remote) machine, this is probably a good option for you. You’ll have to read the instructions on how to install the pipeline server in the pipeline project documentation. In summary:

1. Clone our CogComp-NLP java project.

2. Run pipeline/scripts/runWebserver.sh to start the server.

3. When you see Server:xxx - Started @xxxxxms, the server is up and running:

After making sure that the server is running, we can make python call to it:

from ccg_nlp import remote_pipeline
pipeline = remote_pipeline.RemotePipeline(server_api='http://www.fancyUrlName.com:8080')
# constructor declaration: RemotePipeline(server_api = None, file_name = None)
# "server_api" is the address of the server as string. An example: http://www.fancyUrlName.com:8080
# "file_name" is the config file used to set up pipeline (optional), please refer the latter section for more details

Note: This tool is based on CogComp’s pipeline project. Essentially annotator included in the pipeline should be accessible here.

Local Pipeline

In this setting, the system will download the trained models and files required to run the pipeline locally. Since everything is run on your machine, it will probably require a lot of memory (the amount depends on which annotations you use). If you have a single big machine (i.e. memory > 15GB) for your expeirments, this is probably a good option for you.

To download the models, run the following command:

python -m ccg_nlp download

This will download model files into your home directly under ~/.ccg_nlp/.

Note: Note that downloading the models require you to have Maven installed on your machine. If you don’t, here are some guidelines on how to install it.

Note: To use the pipelne locally (A) you have to make sure you have set JAVA_HOME variable. In MacOS, you can verify it with echo "$JAVA_HOME". If it is not set, you can export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home).

In the local pipeline the views are disabled by default. If you want to change specific behaviors, such as activating or deactivating specific components, you can specify the parameters while initializing local/remote pipeline module.

from ccg_nlp import local_pipeline
pipeline = local_pipeline.LocalPipeline()
# constructor declaration: LocalPipeline()

Setting from Configuration file

You can set settings on how to run CogComp-NLPy via a local option too, rather than setting it programmatically. Here is how to:

from ccg_nlpy import remote_pipeline
pipeline = remote_pipeline.RemotePipeline(file_name = 'path_to_custom_config_file')

The default keys and values are specified below. If you want to use custom config file, please provide a file in similar format.

[remote_pipeline_setting]
api = ADDRESS_OF_THE_SERVER # example: http://fancyUrlName.com:8080

System failures

System failures are part of any software system. Upon some certain outputs (e.g. receiving error 500 from remote pipeline), we return None in the output of call. When processing big documents it might make sense to check take care of this explicitly:

d = ... # docuemnt
p = ... # pipeline
doc = p.doc(d)
if doc is not None:
    # do sth with it
    ner_view = doc.get_ner_conll

Questions/Suggestions/Comments

Use comments or pull requests.