NLPclient

Stanford CoreNLP

Stanford CoreNLP is a Java suite for Natural Language Processing (NLP). In its new version it includes a web API server. The NLPclient package provides client access to the CoreNLP server. In the following we provide information on how to set up and to use NLPclient, for more information about the CoreNLP Server we refer to https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/corenlp-server.html.

Install NLPclient

To install NLPclient from CRAN, execute:

install.packages("NLPclient")

For NLPclient to do anything useful CoreNLP server has to be installed. CoreNLP server can either be run by starting the server with Java directly or by running the server under docker. For running CoreNLP server with Java we refer to the CoreNLP Server documentation.

Install docker

The RSelenium documentation provides a nice introduction on the usage of docker which also gives guidance on the docker installation.

Run CoreNLP server with docker

We recommend to use the docker image schwe/corenlp from https://hub.docker.com/r/schwe/corenlp it is derived from frnkenstien/corenlp but allows to insert arguments into server startup and to specify default properties. The image can be obtained by

docker pull schwe/corenlp

To start the CoreNLP server a command similar to

docker run -p 9000:9000 --name coreNLP --rm -i -t schwe/corenlp

can be used, this will also download the docker image if necessary. On Linux it might by necessary to run docker with sudo or to setup docker to be manageable a non-root user.

The function nlp_server_docker_run can be used to create the run command from within R.

nlp_server_docker_run(memory = "-mx4g", threads = 2L)
#R> "docker run -p 9000:9000 --name coreNLP --env PREARGS='-mx4g' --env SUBARGS='-threads 2' --rm -i -t schwe/corenlp"

nlp_server_docker_run returns the run command as a string, to run the server the command has to be copied into the terminal (on Unix) or the docker toolbox (on Windows).