How to connect Stanford Core Server from dotnet - stanford-nlp

Question

I am trying to use Stanford NLP for.NET. I am very new to this.
How can I connect Stanford core NLP server from c# program
My NLP server runs on localhost:9000

Answer 1

You can connect via the .NET HTTPClient or other equivalent .NET call to a web endpoint. You need to set up your NLP endpoint, properties for the NLP server, and the text content you want it to parse. There is additional information on the Stanford NLP Server page, as well as information on what properties can be set depending on what NLP pipeline you want to run.
The following code is from a .NET Core console application using the following call to return Named Entity Recognition, Dependency Parser and OpenIE results.
FYI I've had some occasions where my NLP endpoint didn't work when waking a laptop from sleep mode (Docker for Windows pre 17.12 on Win10). Resetting Docker did the trick for me... if you can't browse to your http://localhost:9000 website, then the endpoint definitely won't work either!
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Net.Http;
// String to process
string s = "This is the sentence to provide to NLP."
// Set up the endpoint
string nlpBaseAddress = "http://localhost:9000"
// Create the query string params for NLPCore
string jsonOptions = "{\"annotators\": \"ner, depparse, openie\", \"outputformat\": \"json\"}";
Dictionary qstringProperties = new Dictionary();
qstringProperties.Add("properties", jsonOptions);
string qString = ToQueryString(qstringProperties);
// Add the query string to the base address
string urlPlusQuery = nlpBaseAddress + qString;
// Create the content to submit
var content = new StringContent(s);
content.Headers.Clear();
content.Headers.Add("Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
// Submit for processing
var client = new HttpClient();
HttpResponseMessage response;
Task tResponse = client.PostAsync(urlPlusQuery, content);
tResponse.Wait();
response = tResponse.Result;
// Check the response
if (response.StatusCode != System.Net.HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
// Do something better than throwing an app exception here!
throw new ApplicationException("Subject-Object tuple extraction returned an unexpected response from the subject-object service");
}
Task rString = response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
rString.Wait();
string jsonResult = rString.Result;
Utility function used within this call to generate a QueryString:
private string ToQueryString(Dictionary nvc)
{
System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder("?");
bool first = true;
foreach (KeyValuePair key in nvc)
{
// CHeck if this is the first value
if (!first)
{
sb.Append("&");
}
sb.AppendFormat("{0}={1}", Uri.EscapeDataString(key.Key), Uri.EscapeDataString(key.Value));
first = false;
}
return sb.ToString();
}