
Duckling: a Clojure library that parses text into structured data - getdreambits
https://duckling.wit.ai/
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binarymax
The thing that I like about Duckling is that it is a rules based system, which
can easily be interrogated. Model based text extraction is much harder to fix
when there is a bug. I use Duckling as a service in value extraction from
queries and content alongside a model based system for NER (such as spaCy).
Using both together makes for more accurate enrichment in general (by cross
referencing between the two for values, and adding exception rules)

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ar7hur
It's exactly how we used it internally for wit.ai

(Very small correction: Duckling is rule-based but uses a super simple Naive
Bayes classifier to prioritize between the many potential parses produced by
the rules -- we see it as a hybrid approach)

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ar7hur
Hello HN, I'm the original author of Duckling (with @blandinw). As usual,
always happy to get feedback and suggestions.

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nudpiedo
I must say it looks very eat from the point of view of usability. Are the
training data sets open? Do you see feasible for small app coders (who don’t
have thousands of examples to train) to use Duckling as more or less NLP
parser without getting too much deep into the NLP and AI theory?

Are the trained sets mean to be used by different client code or languages?

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ar7hur
Yes all the training data is in the repo.

Duckling is relevant to parse very structured language, typically temporal
expressions (dates and times...). It relies on a mix of rules and machine
learning. Rules and datasets for many (human) languages are available in the
repo. You don't need a lot of data to add support for what you need, owing to
this hybrid rules+ML approach (as opposed to just ML).

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woadwarrior01
It’s a Haskell library now.
[https://github.com/facebook/duckling](https://github.com/facebook/duckling)

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mark_l_watson
I came here to mention the same thing. I experimented with the Clojure version
a long while ago, and evaluated the Haskell version about a year ago for a
project at work. Good stuff.

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nudpiedo
Glad to see there life beyond python for corporative AI usage.

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dang
Thread from 2017:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14239942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14239942)

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Vosporos
You're a bit late to the party…

