This Python client can be used to process in an efficient concurrent manner a set of PDF in a given directory by the GROBID service. Results are written in a given output directory and include the resulting XML TEI representation of the PDF.
You need first to install and start the grobid service, latest stable version, see the documentation. It is assumed that the server will run on the address http://localhost:8070. You can change the server address by editing the file config.json.
This client has been developed and tested with Python 3.5.
Get the github repo:
cd grobid-client-python
It is advised to setup first a virtual environment to avoid falling into one of these gloomy python dependency marshlands:
virtualenv --system-site-packages -p python3 env
source env/bin/activate
usage: grobid-client.py [-h] [--input INPUT] [--config CONFIG]
[--output OUTPUT] [--n N]
service
Client for GROBID services
positional arguments:
service one of [processFulltextDocument, processHeaderDocument,
processReferences]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--input INPUT path to the directory containing PDF to process
--output OUTPUT path to the directory where to put the results
--config CONFIG path to the config file, default is ./config.json
--n N Concurrency for service usage
Example:
python3 grobid-client.py --input ~/tmp/in2 --output ~/tmp/out processFulltextDocument
This command will process all the PDF files present in the input directory (files with extension .pdf only) with the processFulltextDocument service of GROBID, and write the resulting XML TEI files under the output directory, reusing the file name with a different file extension (.tei.xml), using the default 10 concurrent workers.
python3 grobid-client.py --input ~/tmp/in2 --output ~/tmp/out --n 20 processHeaderDocument
This command will process all the PDF files present in the input directory (files with extension .pdf only) with the processHeaderDocument service of GROBID, and write the resulting XML TEI files under the output directory, reusing the file name with a different file extension (.tei.xml), using 20 concurrent workers.
Full text processing of 136 PDF (total 3443 pages, in average 25 pages per PDF) on Intel Core i7-4790K CPU 4.00GHz, 4 cores (8 threads), 16GB memory, n being the concurrency parameter:
| n | runtime (s) | s/PDF |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 209.0 | 1.54 |
| 2 | 112.0 | 0.82 |
| 3 | 80.4 | 0.59 |
| 5 | 62.9 | 0.46 |
| 8 | 55.7 | 0.41 |
| 10 | 55.3 | 0.40 |
As complementary info, GROBID processing of header, with of the 136 PDF and with n=10 takes 3.74 s (15 times faster than the complete full text processing because only the two first pages of the PDF are considered). In similar conditions, extraction and structuring of bibliographical references takes 26.9 s.
Benchmarking with more files (e.g. million ISTEX PDF). Also implement existing GROBID services for text input (date, name, affiliation/address, raw bibliographical references, etc.). Better support for parameters (including elements where to put coordinates).
Distributed under Apache 2.0 license.
Main author and contact: Patrice Lopez (patrice.lopez@science-miner.com)