JavaRAP

Introduction

JavaRAP is an implementation of the classic Resolution of Anaphora Procedure (RAP) given by Lappin and Leass (1994) . It resolves third person pronouns, lexical anaphors, and identifies pleonastic pronouns. The original purpose of the implementation is to provide anaphora resolution result to our TREC 2003 Q&A system. Since RAP is so widely known, we shortly came to the idea of making this implementation freely available to the research community, in the hope that it could

be used as a reference to benchmark other anaphora resolution algorithms or systems; and
provide anaphora resolution function as needed by other NLP applications.

We name the implementation as JavaRAP because it is developed in Java. Such a decision in programming language makes it more easily portable over hardware platforms, however less straightforwardly when the operating system changes.

Features

Target Language:

English

Input Format:

plain text;
text with XML tags, in particular
text with MUC co-reference annotations.

Output Format:

anaphor - antecedent pairs;
text with in-place substitutions.

Accuracy:

57.9%

Efficiency

around 1,500 words per second (on a P2.4G, 1G linux box, excluding parsing time)

Programming Language

Java

Software Required

the Charniak parser, which can be found here;
Java JDK 1.4 ++

Associated Tools:

Sentence Splitter
Anaphora Resolver Evaluator

performing pair-wise comparison between resolution results (by JavaRAP or other resolver) and annotations (MUC co-reference annotation convention).

News

Feb 12, 2006:
JavaRAP now works on Windows® after the way it calls the Charniak parser is changed (previously depending on pipe);
The MANIFEST file is corrected and JavaRAP can be started by an easier "java -jar AnaphoraResolution.jar";
Source code released.
July 25, 2005:
A bug in SentenceSplitter fixed.
Source of SentenceSplitter released.
May 25, 2005:
Thinking about releasing the source code under GPL. An alpha version is ready for testing now. Please drop me an email if you want to check it out. Thanks ...
Start FAQ.
Sep 27,2004 (Chinese Mid Autumn Festival):
Package name changed from edu.nus.comp.NLP.tool.anaphoraresolution to edu.nus.comp.nlp.tool.anaphoraresolution.

Demo

Try it out online!

Download

JavaRAP_1.11(classes) (code)
JavaRAP_1.1(classes) (code)
JavaRAP_1.02(classes only)
JavaRAP_1.01(classes only)
Sentence Splitter

Installation

Decompress the tar file.
Make sure you have the following files and directories under "JavaRAP_x.y":

AnaphorResolution.jar
env.jrap (the file JavaRAP reads environment variables from). Please modify it for JavaRAP to work properly.
Data (the directory where the JavaRAP's knowledge base resides)

Change the path to "JavaRAP_x.y", where "x.y" are version numbers, and you are ready to go!

Usage

To resolve anaphors in a text file inputFile by JavaRAP:

java -classpath AnaphoraResolution.jar edu.nus.comp.nlp.tool.anaphoraresolution.JavaRAP inputFile
alternatively: java -jar AnaphoraResolution.jar inputFile

To use JavaRAP to resolve anaphors and compare the results with the annotations in an annotatedFile:

java -classpath AnaphoraResolution.jar edu.nus.comp.nlp.tool.anaphoraresolution.Evaluation annotatedFile

To compare the anaphora resolution results stored in a resultFile* with the annotations in a annotatedFile:

java -classpath AnaphoraResolution.jar edu.nus.comp.nlp.tool.anaphoraresolution.Evaluation -r resultFile annotatedFile

To split the text in inputFile into sentences:

java -jar SentenceSplitter.jar inputFile

*Each line in a resultFile contains a single record, which shows one anaphor and its antecedent, in the form:

(sentenceIndex,tokenOffset) antecedent <-- (sentenceIndex,tokenOffset) anaphor,

where sentenceIndex is the index of the sentence in the complete article, starting from 0; and
tokenOffset is the index of the first token (puncuation or word) of the phrase in the sentence, starting from 0 as well.

FAQ & Special Issues

I got the latest Charniak parser compiled on Windows XP, but within cygwin. The executable (parseIt) has an extra suffix .exe and that is not what JavaRAP expects. Please make a copy of the executable and name it "parseIt" if you run into this problem.
Why did I get "Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: edu/nus/comp/NLP/tool/anaphoraresolution/JavaRAP"?

I changed the package name from edu/nus/comp/NLP/tool/anaphoraresolution to edu/nus/comp/nlp/tool/anaphoraresolution. Sorry about that.

References

Long Qiu, Min-Yen Kan and Tat-Seng Chua. (2004). A Public Reference Implementation of the RAP Anaphora Resolution Algorithm. In proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004). Vol. I, pp. 291-294.

Links

The poster we presented at LREC 2004, Lisbon, Portugal.
Check out our Natural Language Processing / Information Retrieval research framework webpage to find other NLP resources we have.

Contact

QIUL at MYSOC dot NET