Simple server wrapper for Stanford CoreNLP parser.

This wrapper was written to help interactive applications that use corenlp. Our main goal is to avoid the overhead of repeatedly starting corenlp and loading its resources.

We attempt to make the experience of using CoreNLP as close to the offline version as possible and to be agnostic to whatever other tooling you may have around it:

• work as a drop-in substitute for the usual command line interface (accept the same arguments)
• we do not parse/interpret results from corenlp: instead we just return the XML output

Your job as a user would be to write a client communicating with the server in a supported protocol (for now, we've fairly arbitrarily chosen ZeroMQ as a hopefully simple starting point); and to parse the Stanford CoreNLP XML.

Getting started

This package uses Maven for as its build/dependency system.

mvn package

To run the server and its example client through maven

mvn exec:java -D server
mvn exec:java -D client\
    -Dexec.args="ping 'process why hello there' ping stop'"

Otherwise you're on your own for working out the combination of jars (stanford corenlp, jeromq, this server).

Note also the Python example client:

cd src/main/python
pip install pyzmq
python client.py 'process it may work in Python too'

Protocol

Note that there is a simple communication protocol between server and client (on top of what lower-level protocol or layer you may be using).

For now it consists of one word command followed by optional single space and payload.

Commands:

• stop
• ping
• process SP text...

If the server becomes more complicated than this, we may need to switch to some sort more formal language

Ping

The response will just be the word "pong"

Process

The response will be CoreNLP XML

License (GPL v2+)

I'm happy for this to public domain in principle; however, I think I use snippets of corenlp in places so we'll likely have to go with GPL v2 or later.