
Ask HN: What cool NLP project are you working on? - tangled_zans
Hey guys, I&#x27;m quite keen to get more into NLP, so would anyone want to share what they&#x27;ve been hacking to give me some inspiration?
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stephenr
I worked on a project (customer recommendation stuff, not that interesting in
and of itself) that used Stanford's CoreNLP.

Due to the project not being written in Java, we obviously needed a way to
communicate with CoreNLP without the cost of calling java for every job.

The solution in the end was to fork an existing (Java) project that wraps
CoreNLP and exposes it over HTTP.

The fork adds:

\- support for JSON (the original was XML only)

\- packages it for Debian

\- defaults to "today" for relative dates

\- adds a utility class 'RegexNERValidator' to allow testing/quoting of
mapping files for CoreNLP's RegexNER, to allow checking a file can be used by
RegexNER before the main CoreNLP process is restarted.

The result is at
[https://github.com/Koalephant/StanfordCoreNLPHTTPServer](https://github.com/Koalephant/StanfordCoreNLPHTTPServer)

Please note: I do _not_ usually work in Java, so I'm well aware there are
likely better ways to achieve some/many/all things this project does. If you
feel inclined to improve it, send a PR (preferably with some indication of
_why_ its an improvement, if its not an obvious bug/feature improvement).

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tangled_zans
Wow, thanks for sharing! I did look at CoreNLP before and the fact that it's
in Java has put me off, so this will be useful :)

~~~
stephenr
You're welcome, I'd love to hear what you end up building.

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trill1
A web app that helps English language learners with reading and pronunciation:

[https://lexical.io](https://lexical.io)

It tries to find relevant multilingual information from Wikipedia and
Wiktionary when you click on words in a submitted text.

Eventually I want to expand it to other target languages beyond English.

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yolesaber
Bias detector in python for NYT articles using Vader sentiment analysis and
the textacy library. Rates articles positive, negative, and neutral sentiments
and how intense each one is. Although the majority of the heavy lifting is
covered in the library, it's open source on github and reading the code (the
actual main operations are less than 500 lines) is teaching me some cool NLP
techniques, especially when it comes to rule-based analysis.

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tangled_zans
Nice! You got a link?

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yolesaber
Not ready yet ;) but I'll be posting it when it is!

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trca
A natural language home automation interface to control all the electronics in
my home.

~~~
tangled_zans
Ooo, nice one :D What does it control so far?

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js4
At Vesper.ai we worked on an application that read email and recommended which
messages users should followup on.

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tsycho
What are good resources/courses for getting into NLP? Where do I start?

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happycry
The NLTK book serves as a great resource for getting dirty with minimal math
and more programming examples:

[http://www.nltk.org/book/](http://www.nltk.org/book/)

There are a couple of courses I've heard are fantastic. The first that I'm
going through right now is by Michael Collins:

[https://www.coursera.org/course/nlangp](https://www.coursera.org/course/nlangp)

The other is by Dan Jurafsky:

[https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp](https://www.coursera.org/course/nlp)

