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About

Stanford CoreNLP provides a set of natural language analysis tools which can take raw English language text input and give the base forms of words, their parts of speech, whether they are names of companies, people, etc., normalize dates, times, and numeric quantities, and mark up the structure of sentences in terms of phrases and word dependencies, and indicate which noun phrases refer to the same entities. It provides the foundational building blocks for higher level text understanding applications.

Stanford CoreNLP integrates all our NLP tools for the English language, including the part-of-speech (POS) tagger, the named entity recognizer (NER), the parser, and the coreference resolution system. The goal of this project is to enable people to quickly and painlessly get complete linguistic annotations of natural language texts. It is designed to be highly flexible and extensible, i.e., with a single option you can change which tools should be enabled and which should be disabled.

The Stanford CoreNLP code is licensed under the GNU General Public License (v2 or later). Source is included. Note that this is the full GPL, which allows many free uses, but not its use in distributed proprietary software. The download is 195 MB and requires Java 1.5+.

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Usage

Parsing a file and saving the output as XML

Before using Stanford CoreNLP, it is usual to create a configuration file (a Java Properties file). Minimally, this file should contain the "annotators" property, which contains a comma-separated list of Annotators to use. For example, the setting below enables: tokenization, sentence splitting (required by most Annotators), POS tagging, lemmatization, NER, syntactic parsing, and coreference resolution.

annotators = tokenize, ssplit, pos, lemma, ner, parse, dcoref

However, if you just want to specify one or two properties, you can instead place them on the command line.

To process one file using Stanford CoreNLP, use the following sort of command line (adjust the JAR file date extensions to your downloaded release):

java -cp stanford-corenlp-YYYY-MM-DD.jar:stanford-corenlp-models-YYYY-MM-DD.jar:xom.jar:joda-time.jar -Xmx3g edu.stanford.nlp.pipeline.StanfordCoreNLP [ -props <YOUR CONFIGURATION FILE> ] -file <YOUR INPUT FILE>

java -cp stanford-corenlp-2010-11-12.jar:stanford-corenlp-models-2010-11-06.jar:xom.jar:joda-time.jar
-Xmx3g edu.stanford.nlp.pipeline.StanfordCoreNLP -annotators tokenize,ssplit,pos,lemma,ner,parse,dcoref -file input.txt

• Stanford CoreNLP requires Java version 1.5 or higher.
• -Xmx3g specifies the amount of RAM that Java will reserve. On a 64-bit machine, Stanford CoreNLP typically requires 3GB to run (and it may need even more, depending on the size of the document to parse). On a 32-bit machine, you should be okay with -Xmx1800m.
• The above command works for Mac OS X or Linux. For Windows, the colons (:) separating the jar files need to be semi-colons (;). And, if you are not sitting in the distribution directory, you'll also need to include a path to the files before each.
• The -annotators argument is actually optional. If you leave it out, the code uses a built in properties file, which enables the following annotators: tokenization and sentence splitting, POS tagging, lemmatization, NER, parsing, and coreference resolution (that is, what we used in this example).
• Processing a short text like this is very inefficient. It takes about two minutes to load everything before processing begins. You should batch your processing.

If you want to process a list of files use the following command line:

java -cp stanford-corenlp-YYYY-MM-DD.jar:stanford-corenlp-models-YYYY-MM-DD.jar:xom.jar:joda-time.jar -Xmx3g edu.stanford.nlp.pipeline.StanfordCoreNLP [ -props <YOUR CONFIGURATION FILE> ] -filelist <YOUR LIST OF FILES>

where the -filelist parameter points to a file whose content lists all files to be processed (one per line).

Note that the -props parameter is optional -- by default, it will search for StanfordCoreNLP.properties in your classpath and use the defaults included in the distribution.

By default, output files are written to the current directory. You may specify an alternate output directory with the flag -outputDirectory. Output filenames are the same as input filenames but with -outputExtension added them (.xml by default). It will overwrite (clobber) output files by default. Pass -noClobber to avoid this behavior. Additionally, if you'd rather it replace the extension with the -outputExtension, pass the -replaceExtension flag. This will result in filenames like test.xml instead of test.txt.xml (when given test.txt as an input file).

For each input file, Stanford CoreNLP generates one XML file with all relevant annotation. For example, for the above configuration and a file containing the text below:

Stanford University is located in California. It is a great university.

Stanford CoreNLP generates the following output, with the following attributes.

Note that the XML output uses the CoreNLP-to-HTML.xsl stylesheet file, which can be downloaded from here. This stylesheet enables human-readable display of the above XML content. For example, the previous example should be displayed like this.

Stanford CoreNLP also has the ability to remove most XML from a document before processing it. (CDATA is not correctly handled.) For example, if run with the annotators

annotators = tokenize, cleanxml, ssplit, pos, lemma, ner, parse, dcoref

and given the text

<xml>Stanford University is located in California. It is a great university.</xml>

Using the Stanford CoreNLP API

The backbone of the CoreNLP package is formed by two classes: Annotation and Annotator. Annotations are the data structure which hold the results of annotations. Annotations are basically maps, from keys to bits of the annotation, such as the parse, the part-of-speech tags, or named entity tags. Annotators are a lot like functions, except that they operate over Annotations instead of Objects. They do things like tokenize, parse, or NER tag sentences. Annotators and Annotations are integrated by AnnotationPipelines, which create sequences of generic Annotators. Stanford CoreNLP inherits from the AnnotationPipeline class, and is customized with NLP Annotators.

The table below summarizes the Annotators currently supported and the Annotations that they generate.

Property name	Annotator class name	Generated Annotation	Description
tokenize	PTBTokenizerAnnotator	TokensAnnotation (list of tokens), and CharacterOffsetBeginAnnotation, CharacterOffsetEndAnnotation, TextAnnotation (for each token)	Tokenizes the text. This component started as a PTB-style tokenizer, but was extended since then to handle noisy and web text. The tokenizer saves the character offsets of each token in the input text, as CharacterOffsetBeginAnnotation and CharacterOffsetEndAnnotation.
cleanxml	CleanXmlAnnotator	XmlContextAnnotation	Remove xml tokens from the document
ssplit	WordToSentenceAnnotator	SentencesAnnotation	Splits a sequence of tokens into sentences.
pos	POSTaggerAnnotator	PartOfSpeechAnnotation	Labels tokens with their POS tag. For more details see this page.
lemma	MorphaAnnotator	LemmaAnnotation	Generates the word lemmas for all tokens in the corpus.
ner	NERClassifierCombiner	NamedEntityTagAnnotation and NormalizedNamedEntityTagAnnotation	Recognizes named (PERSON, LOCATION, ORGANIZATION, MISC) and numerical entities (DATE, TIME, MONEY, NUMBER). Named entities are recognized using a combination of three CRF sequence taggers trained on various corpora, such as ACE and MUC. Numerical entities are recognized using a rule-based system. Numerical entities that require normalization, e.g., dates, are normalized to NormalizedNamedEntityTagAnnotation. For more details on the CRF tagger see this page.
regexner	RegexNERAnnotator	NamedEntityTagAnnotation	Implements a rule-based NER using Java regular expressions. The goal of this Annotator is to provide a simple framework to incorporate NE labels that are not annotated in traditional NL corpora. For example, the default list of regular expressions that we distribute recognizes ideologies (IDEOLOGY), nationalities (NATIONALITY), religions (RELIGION), and titles (TITLE).
truecase	TrueCaseAnnotator	TrueCaseAnnotation and TrueCaseTextAnnotation	Recognizes the true case of tokens in text where this information was lost, e.g., all upper case text. This is implemented with a discriminative model implemented using a CRF sequence tagger. The true case label, e.g., INIT_UPPER is saved in TrueCaseAnnotation. The token text adjusted to match its true case is saved as TrueCaseTextAnnotation.
parse	ParserAnnotator	TreeAnnotation, BasicDependenciesAnnotation, CollapsedDependenciesAnnotation, CollapsedCCProcessedDependenciesAnnotation	Provides full syntactic analysis, using both the constituent and the dependency representations. The constituent-based output is saved in TreeAnnotation. We generate three dependency-based outputs, as follows: basic, uncollapsed dependencies, saved in BasicDependenciesAnnotation; collapsed dependencies saved in CollapsedDependenciesAnnotation; and collapsed dependencies with processed coordinations, in CollapsedCCProcessedDependenciesAnnotation. Most users of our parser will prefer the latter representation. For more details on the parser, please see this page. For more details about the dependencies, please refer to this page.
dcoref	DeterministicCorefAnnotator	CorefChainAnnotation	Implements both pronominal and nominal coreference resolution. The entire coreference graph (with head words of mentions as nodes) is saved in CorefChainAnnotation. For more details on the underlying coreference resolution algorithm, see this page.

Depending on which annotators you use, please cite the corresponding papers on: POS tagging, NER, parsing, or coreference resolution.

To construct a Stanford CoreNLP object from a given set of properties, use StanfordCoreNLP(Properties props). This method creates the pipeline using the annotators given in the "annotators" property (see above for an example setting). The complete list of accepted annotator names is listed in the first column of the table at the top of this page. To parse an arbitrary text, use the annotate(Annotation document) method.

The code below shows how to create and use a Stanford CoreNLP object:

    // creates a StanfordCoreNLP object, with POS tagging, lemmatization, NER, parsing, and coreference resolution 
    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 = ... // Add your text here!
    
    // 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);

Annotator options

While all Annotators have a default behavior that is likely to be sufficient for the majority of users, most Annotators take additional options that can be passed as Java properties in the configuration file. We list below the configuration options for all Annotators:

tokenize:

• tokenize.whitespace: if set to true, separates words only when whitespace is encountered.

• clean.xmltags: Discard xml tag tokens that match this regular expression. For example, .* will discard all xml tags.
• clean.sentenceendingtags: treat tags that match this regular expression as the end of a sentence. For example, p will treat <p> as the end of a sentence.
• clean.allowflawedxml: if this is true, allow errors such as unclosed tags. Otherwise, such xml will cause an exception.
• clean.datetags: a regular expression that specifies which tags to treat as the reference date of a document. Defaults to datetime|date

• ssplit.eolonly: only split sentences on newlines. Only works in conjunction with "-tokenize.whitespace true", in which case StanfordCoreNLP will split one sentence per line, only separating words on whitespace.
• ssplit.isOneSentence: each document is to be treated as one sentence, no splitting at all.

• pos.model: POS model to use. There is no need to explicitly set this option, unless you want to use a different POS model (for advanced developers only). By default, this is set to the POS model included in the stanford-corenlp-models JAR file.
• pos.maxlen: Maximum sentence size for the POS sequence tagger. Any sentence larger than this is split in smaller sentences before tagging. Useful to control the speed of the tagger on noisy text without punctuation marks.

• ner.model.3class: NER model for the basic three NE classes (PERSON, ORGANIZATION, LOCATION). There is no need to explicitly set this option, unless you want to use a different NER model (for advanced developers only). By default, this is set to the NER model included in the stanford-corenlp-models JAR file.
• ner.model.7class: NER model that includes the above three classes and four additional numerical entities (from the MUC corpus). There is no need to explicitly set this option, unless you want to use a different NER model (for advanced developers only). By default, this is set to the NER model included in the stanford-corenlp-models JAR file.
• ner.model.MISCclass: NER model that recognizes MISCellaneous named entities (trained on the CoNLL corpus). There is no need to explicitly set this option, unless you want to use a different NER model (for advanced developers only). By default, this is set to the NER model included in the stanford-corenlp-models JAR file.

• regexner.mapping: file that stores rules, i.e., the mapping from regular expressions to NE classes. The format is one rule per line; each rule has two mandatory tokens separated by one tab. The first token stores the Java regular expression. The second token points to the NE class to assign when the regular expression matches one or a sequence of tokens. An optional third rule token indicates which regular named entity types can be overwritten by the current rule. For example, the rule "U\.S\.A\. COUNTRY LOCATION" marks the token "U.S.A." as a COUNTRY, overwriting the previous LOCATION label (if it exists).
• regexner.ignorecase: if set to true, matching will be case insensitive. Default value is false.

• parser.model: parsing model to use. There is no need to explicitly set this option, unless you want to use a different parsing model (for advanced developers only). By default, this is set to the parsing model included in the stanford-corenlp-models JAR file.
• parser.maxlen: if set, the annotator parses only sentences shorter (in terms of number of tokens) than this number. For longer sentences, the parser creates a flat structure, where every token is assigned to the non-terminal X. This is useful when parsing noisy web text, which may generate arbitrarily long sentences. By default, this option is not set.

• dcoref.sievePasses: list of sieve modules to enable in the system, specified as a comma-separated list of class names. By default, this property is set to include all available sieve passes: "edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.MarkRole, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.ExactStringMatch, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.RelaxedExactStringMatch, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.PreciseConstructs, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.StrictHeadMatch1, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.StrictHeadMatch2, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.StrictHeadMatch3, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.RelaxedHeadMatch, edu.stanford.nlp.dcoref.sievepasses.PronounMatch". The default value can be found in Constants.SIEVEPASSES.
• dcoref.demonym: list of demonyms from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adjectival_forms_of_place_names. The format of this file is: location TAB singular gentilic form TAB plural gentilic form, e.g., "Algeria Algerian Algerians".
• dcoref.animate and dcoref.inanimate: lists of animate/inanimate words, from (Ji and Lin, 2009). The format is one word per line.
• dcoref.male, dcoref.female, dcoref.neutral: lists of words of male/female/neutral gender, from (Bergsma and Lin, 2006) and (Ji and Lin, 2009). The format is one word per line.
• dcoref.plural and dcoref.singular: lists of words that are plural or singular, from (Bergsma and Lin, 2006). The format is one word per line. All the above dictionaries are already set to the files included in the stanford-corenlp-models JAR file, but they can easily be adjusted to your needs by setting these properties.
• oldCorefFormat: produce a CorefGraphAnnotation, the output format used in releases v1.0.3 or earlier. Note that this uses quadratic memory rather than linear.

SUTime

StanfordCoreNLP includes SUTime, Stanford's temporal expression recognizer. SUTime is transparently called from the "ner" annotator, so no configuration is necessary. Furthermore, the "cleanxml" annotator now extracts the reference date for a given XML document, so relative dates, e.g., "yesterday", are transparently normalized with no configuration necessary.

SUTime supports the same annotations as before, i.e., NamedEntityTagAnnotation is set with the label of the numeric entity (DATE, TIME, DURATION, MONEY, PERCENT, or NUMBER) and NormalizedNamedEntityTagAnnotation is set to the value of the normalized temporal expression. Note that NormalizedNamedEntityTagAnnotation now follows the TIMEX3 standard, rather than Stanford's internal representation, e.g., "2010-01-01" for the string "January 1, 2010", rather than "20100101".

Also, SUTime now sets the TimexAnnotation key to an edu.stanford.nlp.time.Timex object, which contains the complete list of TIMEX3 fields for the corresponding expressions, such as "val", "alt_val", "type", "tid". This might be useful to developers interested in recovering covering complete TIMEX3 expressions.

Reference dates are by default extracted from the "datetime" and "date" tags in a document. To set a different set of tags to use, use the clean.datetags property.

Javadoc

More information is available in the javadoc: Stanford Core NLP Javadoc

Adding a new annotator

StanfordCoreNLP also has the capacity to add a new annotator by reflection without altering the code in StanfordCoreNLP.java. To create a new annotator, extend the class edu.stanford.nlp.pipeline.Annotator and define a constructor with the signature (String, Properties). Then, add the property customAnnotatorClass.FOO=BAR to the properties used to create the pipeline. If FOO is then added to the list of annotators, the class BAR will be created, with the name used to create it and the properties file passed in.

Extensions: Packages by others using Stanford CoreNLP

Python wrapper including JSON-RPC server by Dustin Smith.

cleartk-stanford-corenlp is a UIMA wrapper for Stanford CoreNLP built by Steven Bethard in the context of the ClearTK toolkit.

Perl wrapper by Kalle Räisänen.

Ruby bindings by Louis Mullie.

Questions

Questions, feedback, and bug reports/fixes can be sent to our mailing lists.

Mailing Lists

We have 3 mailing lists for the Stanford Coreference Rersolution System, all of which are shared with other JavaNLP tools (with the exclusion of the parser). Each address is at @lists.stanford.edu:

1. java-nlp-user This is the best list to post to in order to ask questions, make announcements, or for discussion among JavaNLP users. You have to subscribe to be able to use it. Join the list via this webpage or by emailing java-nlp-user-join@lists.stanford.edu. (Leave the subject and message body empty.) You can also look at the list archives.
2. java-nlp-announce This list will be used only to announce new versions of Stanford JavaNLP tools. So it will be very low volume (expect 1-3 messages a year). Join the list via this webpage or by emailing java-nlp-announce-join@lists.stanford.edu. (Leave the subject and message body empty.)
3. java-nlp-support This list goes only to the software maintainers. It's a good address for licensing questions, etc. For general use and support questions, you're better off joining and using java-nlp-user. You cannot join java-nlp-support, but you can mail questions to java-nlp-support@lists.stanford.edu.

Online Demo

Release History