Trying to give Constructive Criticism from a Opennlp Beginner

["MrPowerg8 ." <gr...@gmail.com>]

So many times have i come across opennlp while programming java but never
really thought of using it but a week or so a go i wanted to give it a go
and see if it worked better than my own project, so i follow the very vague
instructions on your website downloaded and installed maven (which was a
pain on its own) then continued with the instructions coming across lots of
problems on the way with very little documentation of fixes for any of
them. The "build procedure" instructions
http://opennlp.apache.org/building.html give several instructions of
commands to run via maven, none of which were even the correct ones to use
or work and i ended up making some stupid project and running a hello world
example accidentally while following
http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/maven-in-five-minutes.html but
at least that got the job done.
Well after 2-3 days (4-6 hours) i got it working so that mvn --version
displayed what it is meant to. n

Now there is absolutely nothing about how to use it in conjunction with any
IDE's so i had to import library of ever single jar in
"apache-opennlp-1.5.3" which i could finally create code with that ran but
then the code couldn't find any of the models which i then downloaded from
here http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/models-1.5/ and once again had to
figure out myself what to do with them as there are no instructions and
ended up importing them as well as placing them in my project folder.

now can you please explain why this is so complicated compared to other
api's where i can normally download a single jar and import it?

my conclusion is that opennpl has not nearly enough documentation and
guides on everything due to the fact there are not many people using it
because of how hard and time consuming it is to install and work. (12 hours
total) and how making the instillation process simpler would improve the
things for you and the community greatly.

Re: Trying to give Constructive Criticism from a Opennlp Beginner

[Thomas Zastrow <po...@thomas-zastrow.de>]

Hello,

I'm also relatively new to OpenNLP, but I didn't had the problems you
mentioned here. I'm using Netbeans, and the only thing I had to do was
to add the dependencies to a Maven project in Netbeans. Thats all, after
10 minutes or so I was able to work with OpenNLP in my own Java projects.

I build a little Swing application which I use for annotating named
entities. Intergarting the OpenNLP tools so that I'm able to manually
annotate, train and apply the models to new texts from my own
application was a matter of some hours.

I agree with you that at some points the OpenNLP documentation is not
perfect, but overall it was not too hard to get started. Maybe you
should try a modern IDE like Netbeans, this helps you a lot and makes
your work much more efficient.

Best,

Tom



Am 11.10.2013 19:14, schrieb MrPowerg8 .:
> So many times have i come across opennlp while programming java but never
> really thought of using it but a week or so a go i wanted to give it a go
> and see if it worked better than my own project, so i follow the very vague
> instructions on your website downloaded and installed maven (which was a
> pain on its own) then continued with the instructions coming across lots of
> problems on the way with very little documentation of fixes for any of
> them. The "build procedure" instructions
> http://opennlp.apache.org/building.html give several instructions of
> commands to run via maven, none of which were even the correct ones to use
> or work and i ended up making some stupid project and running a hello world
> example accidentally while following
> http://maven.apache.org/guides/getting-started/maven-in-five-minutes.html but
> at least that got the job done.
> Well after 2-3 days (4-6 hours) i got it working so that mvn --version
> displayed what it is meant to. n
> 
> Now there is absolutely nothing about how to use it in conjunction with any
> IDE's so i had to import library of ever single jar in
> "apache-opennlp-1.5.3" which i could finally create code with that ran but
> then the code couldn't find any of the models which i then downloaded from
> here http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/models-1.5/ and once again had to
> figure out myself what to do with them as there are no instructions and
> ended up importing them as well as placing them in my project folder.
> 
> now can you please explain why this is so complicated compared to other
> api's where i can normally download a single jar and import it?
> 
> my conclusion is that opennpl has not nearly enough documentation and
> guides on everything due to the fact there are not many people using it
> because of how hard and time consuming it is to install and work. (12 hours
> total) and how making the instillation process simpler would improve the
> things for you and the community greatly.
>