Finagle name finder
This project is a demonstration of how you can use Finagle to build a service that will identify names of people, places, and organizations in any text you throw at it. It's primarily intended as a pedagogical example, and it's used in a "Finagle Essentials" course taught by Twitter University (you can view the slides for the course here, and the source for the slides is included in this repository).
The project includes a small Scala wrapper for the named entity recognition API provided by OpenNLP (a Java library for natural language processing), together with a couple of implementations (one good and one bad) of Finagle Thrift services that expose the functionality provided by the wrapper.
The following quick start guide describes how to get started with the project in an SBT console, and the API documentation is available on this repository's GitHub Pages site. Please get in touch via @finagle or the Finaglers mailing list if you have any questions about the code here, and we're always happy to see pull requests with additional examples or other improvements!
Quick start
You'll need to download the OpenNLP model files before you can run the project tests or examples:
sh ./download-models.sh
Now when you run ./sbt console from the project root, Scrooge will
generate our Thrift service and client traits, and then it'll
compile them along with the rest of our code and start a Scala console. Paste
the following lines to start a server running locally on port 9090:
import com.twitter.finagle.Thrift
import com.twitter.finagle.examples.names.thriftscala._
val server = SafeNameRecognizerService.create(Seq("en"), 4, 4) map { service =>
Thrift.serveIface("localhost:9090", service)
} onSuccess { _ =>
println("Server started successfully")
} onFailure { ex =>
println("Could not start the server: " + ex)
}Now you can create a client to speak to the server:
import com.twitter.finagle.Thrift
import com.twitter.finagle.examples.names.thriftscala._
val client =
Thrift.newIface[NameRecognizerService.FutureIface]("localhost:9090")
val doc = """
An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes
was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most
methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of
dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men
that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least
conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan,
coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather
more lax than befits a medical man.
"""
client.findNames("en", doc) onSuccess { response =>
println("People: " + response.persons.mkString(", "))
println("Places: " + response.locations.mkString(", "))
} onFailure { ex =>
println("Something bad happened: " + ex.getMessage)
}This will print the following:
People: Sherlock Holmes
Places: Afghanistan
As we'd expect. We can also attempt to find names in a Spanish document, since while we didn't preload the Spanish models when we created our service, we did download them, so the service will be able to load them if asked:
val esDoc = """
Alrededor de 1902 fue el primero en aplicar una descarga eléctrica en un tubo
sellado y con gas neón con la idea de crear una lámpara. Inspirado en parte por
la invención de Daniel McFarlan Moore, la lámpara de Moore, Claude inventó la
lámpara de neón mediante la descarga eléctrica de un gas inerte comprobando que
el brillo era considerable.
"""
client.findNames("es", esDoc) onSuccess { response =>
println("People: " + response.persons.mkString(", "))
println("Places: " + response.locations.mkString(", "))
} onFailure { ex =>
println("Something bad happened: " + ex.getMessage)
}