SuperNER

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a super powerful, cool NLP technique to identiy People, Places, and Things in free text. The downside is that these models aren't always perfect. To get around that, we can set up an ensemble of weak predictors to create a stronger predictor.

Use:

There are two valid methods to use this repo; as a python script, or as an API in Docker.

Python Scripts: Drop the SpacyNER.py and FlairNER.py in your working directory, install the requirements, and import whatever you want to use!
API in Docker: Follow the directions below to build and run the docker image, and then use your programming language of choice to bash text against the appropriate endpoints.

Build the Dockerfile:

In a terminal,

Clone this repo
Type docker build -t superner:0.1 .
Wait for it to finish (go get some coffee)

Running your dockerized NER solution:

In that same terminal, type docker run -p 5000:5000 superner:0.1

Flair will download it's ner-fast model after the container starts for the first time. It's about 250mb, and should take under a minute on a fast connection.

Using the Docker API:

Fire off a request at <ip>:5000/<method>. The ip will be the IP of your machine running the docker container (probably 127.0.0.1), and the method can be spacy or flair.

SpaCy is faster, but does not include a confidence score for NER hits
Flair is slower, but returns a confidence score
Each NER variant has different tags for types of entities. Most of them are simple (Person, Location, etc), but there are some edge cases. SpaCy grabs dates and numbers; Flair seems to have more modern training data (thus tagging COVID-19, etc)

Python Example:

Necessery imports:

import requests
import json

Set up some text to pitch at the API:

sample_text = "Are you, by any chance, wondering about giving yourself wings? You should listen to [Liz McFarland] sharing her experience building a Wonder Woman suit, and not just any – the Golden Eagle suit from Wonder Woman 1984, adorned with a giant pair of wings."

Define your API endpoint. Swap the "spacy" below for "flair" for different processing:

url = "http://127.0.0.1:5000/spacy"

Handle the requests:

x = requests.get(url, json = {'data':sample_text})
print(x.status_code)
if x.status_code == 200:
    response = json.loads(x.text)
    print(response)

Expected SpaCy output:

200
{'0': {'span': [85, 98], 'tag': 'PERSON', 'text': 'Liz McFarland'}, '1': {'span': [134, 146], 'tag': 'ORG', 'text': 'Wonder Woman'}, '2': {'span': [199, 211], 'tag': 'ORG', 'text': 'Wonder Woman'}, '3': {'span': [212, 216], 'tag': 'DATE', 'text': '1984'}}

Expected Flair output: