Issues with Dates in Apache OpenNLP

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

For a recent project to aid me learning NLP I am working on a number of documents, each of which contain a date. What I would like to be able to do is read the unstructured data and identify the date or dates within, converting it into a numeric format and possibly setting it to the documents metadata. (Note: Since the documents being used is all pseudo formation">information, the actual meta data of the files being read in are false).

Recently I have been attempting to use OpenNLP in conjunction with Lucene to do so and it works to a given degree. However if the date is written as "13 January 1990" or "2010/01/05", OpenNLP only identifies "January 1990" and "2010" respectively, but not the entire date. Other date formats may have issues as well, I have yet to try them all. While I recognise that OpenNLP works upon a statistical basis rather than a format basis, I can't help but get the feeling I'm making an elementary mistake.

Am I making a mistake? If not is there an easy manner in which to rectify this?

I understand that I may be able to construct my own trained model based on a training data set. Is the Apache OpenNLP one freely available, so I may extend it? Are there any others that are freely available?

Is there a better way to do this? I've heard of Apache UIMA, the main reason why I went for OpenNLP is due to its mention in Taming Text by Manning. I should note that the extraction of dates is the first stage of the project and other data will be extracted later as well.

Many thanks for any response.