Python wrapper for Stanford NER

The unofficial cross-platform Python wrapper for the state-of-art named entity recognition library from Stanford University.

Input: Google bought IBM for 10 dollars. Mike was happy about this deal.

Output:

Google              	ORGANIZATION
IBM                 	ORGANIZATION
10 dollars          	MONEY
Mike                	PERSON

NOTE: It works well on Linux and Ubuntu but it's unclear for Windows.

About Stanford NER

Named Entity Recognition (NER) labels sequences of words in a text which are the names of things, such as person and company names, or gene and protein names. It comes with well-engineered feature extractors for Named Entity Recognition, and many options for defining feature extractors. Included with the download are good named entity recognizers for English, particularly for the 3 classes (PERSON, ORGANIZATION, LOCATION).

More information can be found here : https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.shtml

Installation

First of all, make sure Java 1.8 is installed. Open a terminal and run this command to check:

java -version

If this is not the case and if your OS is Ubuntu, you can install it this way:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Getting set up

1. Create a virtual environment: virtualenv env
2. Enter that virtual environment: source env/bin/activate
3. Install the requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Run the Flask server: python main.py

Note: If you have any issues running the Flask server, for example: "the flask module isn't found", then delete your pre-existing virtual environment folder and create a new one. Follow steps 1-4 again. This should (hopefully) resolve the issue.

Command

For best use, convert the text to uppercase and submit it to NER.

The code can be executed by the command line or by sending a curl request.

With the main.py server running, you can execute the folowing curl request.

curl -G --data-urlencode "text=GOOGLE BOUGHT IBM FOR 10 DOLLARS. MIKE WAS HAPPY ABOUT THIS DEAL." http://127.0.0.1:5000/ner

Output

Google              	ORGANIZATION
IBM                 	ORGANIZATION
10 dollars          	MONEY
Mike                	PERSON

Support

Just open an issue. Any contributions are welcomed!