modest natural-language processing in javascript

_{by Spencer Kelly and many contributors}

save yourself from regex-whackamole🤞:

nlp(entireNovel).sentences().if('the #Adjective of times').out()
// "it was the blurst of times??"

move things around:

nlp('she sells seashells by the seashore.').sentences().toFutureTense().out()
// 'she will sell seashells...'

respond to text input:

if( doc.has('^simon says (shoot|fire) #Determiner lazer') ){
  fireLazer()
} else {
  dontFire()
}

compromise is not the cleverest.
but it is small, quick, and good-enough for a bunch of stuff.

---

<script src>         one javascript file

🙏     npm install compromise

86%     on the Penn treebank

IE9+       caniuse, youbetcha

⚡️ on the Client-side

<script src="https://unpkg.com/compromise@latest/builds/compromise.min.js"></script>
<script>
  var doc = nlp('dinosaur')

  var str = doc.nouns().toPlural().out('text')
  console.log(str)
  // 'dinosaurs'
</script>

🌋 Server-side!

var nlp = require('compromise')

var doc = nlp('London is calling')
doc.sentences().toNegative()
// 'London is not calling'

Get the hang of things:

Tutorial #1           Input → output

Tutorial #2           Match & transform

Tutorial #3           Making a bot

Detailed docs:

API

Full Tagset

Plugins

Outputs

Match Syntax

Examples:

Part-of-Speech tagging           nouns! verbs! adjectives!	Named-entities                 people, places, organizations	Number parsing                 seven hundred and fifty == 750
Grammar-match         like a regex for a sentence	Verb conjugation           all your base are belong	Normalization           case, whitespace, contractions..

• Plural/singular: - grab the noun-phrases, make em plural:

doc = nlp('a bottle of beer on the wall.')
doc.nouns(0).toPlural()
doc.out('text')
//'The bottles of beer on the wall.'

• Number parsing: - parse written-out numbers, and change their form:

doc = nlp('ninety five thousand and fifty two')
doc.values().toNumber().out()
// '95052'

doc = nlp('the 23rd of December')
doc.values().add(2).toText()
doc.out('text')
// 'the twenty fifth of December'

• Normalization: - handle looseness & variety of random text:

doc = nlp("the guest-singer's björk   at seven thirty.").normalize().out('text')
// 'The guest singer is Bjork at 7:30.'

• Tense: - switch to/from conjugations of any verb

let doc = nlp('she sells seashells by the seashore.')
doc.sentences().toFutureTense().out('text')
//'she will sell seashells...'

doc.verbs().conjugate()
// [{ PastTense: 'sold',
//    Infinitive: 'sell',
//    Gerund: 'selling', ...
// }]

• Contractions: - grab, expand and contract:

doc = nlp("we're not gonna take it, no we ain't gonna take it.")
doc.has('going') // true
doc.match('are not').length // == 2
doc.contractions().expand().out()
//'we are not going to take it, no we are not going to take it'

• Named-entities: - get the people, places, organizations:

doc = nlp('the opera about richard nixon visiting china')
doc.topics().data()
// [
//   { text: 'richard nixon' },
//   { text: 'china' }
// ]

• Custom lexicon: - make it do what you'd like:

var lexicon={
  'boston': 'MusicalGroup'
}
doc = nlp('i heard Boston\'s set in Chicago', lexicon)

//alternatively, fix it 'in-post':
doc.match('heard #Possessive set').terms(1).tag('MusicalGroup')

• Handy outputs: - get sensible data:

doc = nlp('We like Roy! We like Roy!').sentences().out('array')
// ['We like Roy!', 'We like Roy!']

doc = nlp('Tony Hawk').out('html')
/*
<span>
  <span class="nl-Person nl-FirstName">Tony</span>
  <span>&nbsp;</span>
  <span class="nl-Person nl-LastName">Hawk</span>
</span>
*/

• Plugins: - allow adding vocabulary, fixing errors, and setting context quickly:

var plugin = {
  tags:{
    Character:{
      isA: 'Noun'
    }
  },
  words:{
    itchy: 'Character',
    scratchy: 'Character'
  }
}
nlp.plugin(plugin)
nlp(`Couldn't Itchy share his pie with Scratchy?`).debug()
/*
   couldn't   - #Modal, #Verb
   itchy      - #Character, #Noun
   share      - #Infinitive, #Verb
   ...
*/

of course, there's a lot more stuff.

Join in - we're fun, using semver, and moving fast:

Twitter

Slack group

Mailing-list

Projects

Pull-requests

☂️ Isn't javascript too...

yeah!
it wasn't built to compete with the stanford tagger, and may not fit every project.
string stuff is synchronous too, and parallelizing is weird.
See here for information about speed & performance, and here> for project motivations

💃 Can it run on my arduino-watch?

Only if it's water-proof!
Read quickStart for all sorts of funny environments.

🌎 Other Languages?

okay!
we've got work-in-progress forks for German and French, in the same philosophy.
Get involved!

✨ Partial builds?

compromise is one function so can't really be tree-shaken.
.. and the tagging methods are competitive, so it's not recommended to pull things out.
It's best to load the library fully, given it's smaller than this gif.
A plug-in scheme is in the works.

---

Also:

•   naturalNode - fancier statistical nlp in javascript
•   superScript - clever conversation engine in js
•   nodeBox Linguistics - conjugation, inflection in javascript
•   reText - very impressive text utilities in javascript
•   jsPos - javascript build of the time-tested Brill-tagger
•   spaCy - speedy, multilingual tagger in C/python

For the former promise-library, see jnewman/compromise (Thanks Joshua!)

(and don't forget 🙇 NLTK, GATE, Stanford, and Illinois libs )