Natural Language date and time parser for java

Question

Hey guys,

I am working on a Natural Language parser which examines a sentence in english and extracts some information like name, date etc.

for example: "Lets meet next tuesday at 5 PM at the beach."

So the output will be something like : "Lets meet 15/09/2009 at 1700 hr at the beach"

So basically, what i want to know is that is there any framework or library available for JAVA to do these kind of operations like parsing dates from a sentence and give a output with some specified format.

Regards, Pranav

Answer 1

I don't think there's any framework out there that does that out of the box. What you can do is create a set of regular expressions to match those patterns.

Answer 2

You can use JChronic, the Java port of Chronic.

Answer 3

Have you tried jchronic? However, I doubt any library could directly work with sentences: you'd have to extract sentence fragments and feeding them to a NLP date parsing framework yourself, perhaps on a trial-n-error basis (larger and larger fragments until the framework throws an error).

Answer 4

Thanks for the replies. I have looked on few NLPs like LingPipe, OpenPL, Stanford NLP. I wanted to ask do they hav anything for date parsing for java.

Answer 5

I've been working on solving this problem for some time now, and decided to open source what I have so far: http://natty.joestelmach.com.