Question

I’m a newbie with Java and Stanford NLP toolkit and trying to use them for a project. Specifically, I’m trying to use Stanford Corenlp toolkit to annotate a text (with Netbeans and not command line) and I tried to use the code provided on http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/corenlp.shtml#Usage (Using the Stanford CoreNLP API).. question is: can anybody tell me how I can get the output in a file so that I can further process it?

I’ve tried printing the graphs and the sentence to the console, just to see the content. That works. Basically what I’d need is to return the annotated document, so that I can call it from my main class and output a text file (if that’s possible). I’m trying to look in the API of stanford corenlp, but I don’t really know what is the best way to return such kind of information, given my lack of experience.

Here is the code:

Properties props = new Properties();
    props.put("annotators", "tokenize, ssplit, pos, lemma, ner, parse, dcoref");
    StanfordCoreNLP pipeline = new StanfordCoreNLP(props);

    // read some text in the text variable
    String text = "the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog";

    // create an empty Annotation just with the given text
    Annotation document = new Annotation(text);

    // run all Annotators on this text
    pipeline.annotate(document);

    // these are all the sentences in this document
    // a CoreMap is essentially a Map that uses class objects as keys and has values with custom types
    List<CoreMap> sentences = document.get(SentencesAnnotation.class);

    for(CoreMap sentence: sentences) {
      // traversing the words in the current sentence
      // a CoreLabel is a CoreMap with additional token-specific methods
      for (CoreLabel token: sentence.get(TokensAnnotation.class)) {
        // this is the text of the token
        String word = token.get(TextAnnotation.class);
        // this is the POS tag of the token
        String pos = token.get(PartOfSpeechAnnotation.class);
        // this is the NER label of the token
        String ne = token.get(NamedEntityTagAnnotation.class);       
      }

      // this is the parse tree of the current sentence
      Tree tree = sentence.get(TreeAnnotation.class);

      // this is the Stanford dependency graph of the current sentence
      SemanticGraph dependencies = sentence.get(CollapsedCCProcessedDependenciesAnnotation.class);
    }

    // This is the coreference link graph
    // Each chain stores a set of mentions that link to each other,
    // along with a method for getting the most representative mention
    // Both sentence and token offsets start at 1!
    Map<Integer, CorefChain> graph = 
      document.get(CorefChainAnnotation.class);

Answer 1

Once you have any or all of the natural language analyses shown in your code example, all you need to do is send them to a file in the normal Java fashion, e.g., with a FileWriter for text format output. Concretely, here’s a simple complete example that shows output sent to files (if you give it appropriate command-line arguments):

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

import edu.stanford.nlp.io.*;
import edu.stanford.nlp.ling.*;
import edu.stanford.nlp.pipeline.*;
import edu.stanford.nlp.trees.*;
import edu.stanford.nlp.util.*;

public class StanfordCoreNlpDemo {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    PrintWriter out;
    if (args.length > 1) {
      out = new PrintWriter(args[1]);
    } else {
      out = new PrintWriter(System.out);
    }
    PrintWriter xmlOut = null;
    if (args.length > 2) {
      xmlOut = new PrintWriter(args[2]);
    }

    StanfordCoreNLP pipeline = new StanfordCoreNLP();
    Annotation annotation;
    if (args.length > 0) {
      annotation = new Annotation(IOUtils.slurpFileNoExceptions(args[0]));
    } else {
      annotation = new Annotation("Kosgi Santosh sent an email to Stanford University. He didn't get a reply.");
    }

    pipeline.annotate(annotation);
    pipeline.prettyPrint(annotation, out);
    if (xmlOut != null) {
      pipeline.xmlPrint(annotation, xmlOut);
    }
    // An Annotation is a Map and you can get and use the various analyses individually.
    // For instance, this gets the parse tree of the first sentence in the text.
    List<CoreMap> sentences = annotation.get(CoreAnnotations.SentencesAnnotation.class);
    if (sentences != null && sentences.size() > 0) {
      CoreMap sentence = sentences.get(0);
      Tree tree = sentence.get(TreeCoreAnnotations.TreeAnnotation.class);
      out.println();
      out.println("The first sentence parsed is:");
      tree.pennPrint(out);
    }
  }

}