Difference between Stanford CoreNLP and Stanford NER - nlp

What is the difference between using CoreNLP (https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/ner.html) and the standalone distribution Stanford NER (https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.html) for doing Named Entity Recognition? I noticed that the standalone distribution comes with a GUI, but are there any other differences in terms of supported functionality?
I'm trying to decide which one to use for a commercial purpose. I'm working on English models only.

There's no difference in terms of what algorithm is run. I would suggest the full version since you can use the pipeline code. But both versions use the exact same code for the actual NER part.

Related

Adding domain knowledge (custom features) to NER

I'm on an Ubuntu machine with Python 3.5.2 and spaCy 2.0. I'm training a blank Spanish model to recognize entities in resumes. For that I used custom word embeddings and I'm doing a large entity annotation project. I was able to segment a resume and find out which section of the resume the segment belongs to using the word embeddings and I wanna use that knowledge to augment spaCy's NER (for example, if an entity belongs to the work experience section it's more likely to be an organization than an educational institution). I was looking through the documentation and while I saw that there's a way to add custom attributes and/or calculate them using pipelines and extensions I was unable to tell whether the NER algorithm will use them as features by default or if I need to add custom code to it.
Is there any way to do this manually or is it custom behavior?
Thank you, and regards.

Part of speech tagging in OpenNLP vs. StanfordNLP

I'm new to part of speech (pos) taging and I'm doing a pos tagging on a text document. I'm considering using either OpenNLP or StanfordNLP for this. For StanfordNLP I'm using a MaxentTagger and I use english-left3words-distsim.tagger to train it. In OpenNLP I'm using POSModel and train it using en-pos-maxent.bin. How these two taggers (MaxentTagger and POSTagger) and the training sets (english-left3words-distsim.tagger and en-pos-maxent.bin) are different and which one is usually giving a better result.
Both POS taggers are based on Maximum Entropy machine learning. They differ in the parameters/features used to determine POS tags. For example, StanfordNLP pos tagger uses: "(i) more extensive treatment of capitalization for unknown words; (ii) features for the disambiguation of the tense forms of verbs; (iii) features for disambiguating particles from prepositions and adverbs" (read more in the paper). Features of OpenNLP are documented somewhere else which I currently don't know.
The models are probably trained on different corpora.
In general, it is really hard to tell which NLP tool performs better in term of quality. This is really dependent on your domain and you need to test your tools. See following papers for more information:
Is Part-Of-Tagging a Solved Task
Large Dataset for Keyphrases Extraction
In order to address this problem practically, I'm developing a Maven plugin and an annotation tool to create domain-specific NLP models more effectively.

What are some good tools/practises for aspect level sentiment analysis?

I am planning to get some review data from tripadvisor and I want to be able to extract hotel related aspects and assign polarity to them and classify them as negative or positive.
What tools can I use for this purpose and how and where do I start? I know there are some tools like GATE, Stanford NLP, Open NLP etc, but would I be able to perform the above specific tasks? If so, please let me know an approach to go forward. I am planning to use Java as the choice of programming language and would like to use some APIs
Also, should I go ahead with a rule based approach or a ML approach that uses a trained corpus of reviews, so some other approach completely?
P.S : I am new to NLP and I need some help to go forward.
Stanford CoreNLP has lot of features in one package
POS Tagger
NER Model
Sentiment Analysis
Parser
But in Apache OpenNLP package consist
Sentence Detector
POS tagger
NER
Chunker
But they don't have built in feature to find out Sentiment polarity So you have to pass your tags to other libraries such like SentiwordNet to find out the polarity.
I used used OpenNLP and Stanford Core NLP. But for both you need to modify sentiment corpus with respect to restaurant domain.
You can try ConceptNet (http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/). See for instance here (at the bottom of the page): https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet5/wiki/API how to "see 20 things in English with the most positive affect:"

NLTK NER: Continuous Learning

I have been trying to use NER feature of NLTK. I want to extract such entities from the articles. I know that it can not be perfect in doing so but I wonder if there is human intervention in between to manually tag NEs, will it improve?
If yes, is it possible with present model in NLTK to continually train the model. (Semi-Supervised Training)
The plain vanilla NER chunker provided in nltk internally uses maximum entropy chunker trained on the ACE corpus. Hence it is not possible to identify dates or time, unless you train it with your own classifier and data(which is quite a meticulous job).
You could refer this link for performing he same.
Also, there is a module called timex in nltk_contrib which might help you with your needs.
If you are interested to perform the same in Java better look into Stanford SUTime, it is a part of Stanford CoreNLP.

Entity Recognition and Sentiment Analysis using NLP

So, this question might be a little naive, but I thought asking the friendly people of Stackoverflow wouldn't hurt.
My current company has been using a third party API for NLP for a while now. We basically URL encode a string and send it over, and they extract certain entities for us (we have a list of entities that we're looking for) and return a json mapping of entity : sentiment. We've recently decided to bring this project in house instead.
I've been studying NLTK, Stanford NLP and lingpipe for the past 2 days now, and can't figure out if I'm basically reinventing the wheel doing this project.
We already have massive tables containing the original unstructured text and another table containing the extracted entities from that text and their sentiment. The entities are single words. For example:
Unstructured text : Now for the bed. It wasn't the best.
Entity : Bed
Sentiment : Negative
I believe that implies we have training data (unstructured text) as well as entity and sentiments. Now how I can go about using this training data on one of the NLP frameworks and getting what we want? No clue. I've sort of got the steps, but not sure:
Tokenize sentences
Tokenize words
Find the noun in the sentence (POS tagging)
Find the sentiment of that sentence.
But that should fail for the case I mentioned above since it talks about the bed in 2 different sentences?
So the question - Does any one know what the best framework would be for accomplishing the above tasks, and any tutorials on the same (Note: I'm not asking for a solution). If you've done this stuff before, is this task too large to take on? I've looked up some commercial APIs but they're absurdly expensive to use (we're a tiny startup).
Thanks stackoverflow!
OpenNLP may also library to look at. At least they have a small tutuorial to train the name finder and to use the document categorizer to do sentiment analysis. To trtain the name finder you have to prepare training data by taging the entities in your text with SGML tags.
http://opennlp.apache.org/documentation/1.5.3/manual/opennlp.html#tools.namefind.training
NLTK provides a naive NER tagger along with resources. But It doesnt fit into all cases (including finding dates.) But NLTK allows you to modify and customize the NER Tagger according to the requirement. This link might give you some ideas with basic examples on how to customize. Also if you are comfortable with scala and functional programming this is one tool you cannot afford to miss.
Cheers...!
I have discovered spaCy lately and it's just great ! In the link you can find comparative for performance in term of speed and accuracy compared to NLTK, CoreNLP and it does really well !
Though to solve your problem task is not a matter of a framework. You can have two different system, one for NER and one for Sentiment and they can be completely independent. The hype these days is to use neural network and if you are willing too, you can train a recurrent neural network (which has showed best performance for NLP tasks) with attention mechanism to find the entity and the sentiment too.
There are great demo everywhere on the internet, the last two I have read and found interesting are [1] and [2].
Similar to Spacy, TextBlob is another fast and easy package that can accomplish many of these tasks.
I use NLTK, Spacy, and Textblob frequently. If the corpus is simple, generic, and straightforward, Spacy and Textblob work well OOTB. If the corpus is highly customized, domain-specific, messy (incorrect spelling or grammar), etc. I'll use NLTK and spend more time customizing my NLP text processing pipeline with scrubbing, lemmatizing, etc.
NLTK Tutorial: http://www.nltk.org/book/
Spacy Quickstart: https://spacy.io/usage/
Textblob Quickstart: http://textblob.readthedocs.io/en/dev/quickstart.html

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