Getting started

Before you start

Warning

Grobid and grobid-quantities are not compatible with Windows and limited on Apple M1. While Windows users can easily use Grobid and grobid-quantities through docker containers, the support for grobid on ARM is under development, see the latest discussion.

Warning

Since grobid-quantities 0.7.3 (using grobid 0.7.3), we extended the support to JDK after version 11. This requires specifying the java.library.path explicitly. Obviously, all these issues are solved by using Docker containers.

Install and build

Docker containers

The simplest way to run grobid-quantities is via docker containers.

The Grobid-quantities repository provides a configuration file for docker: resources/config/config-docker.yml, which should work out of the box, although we recommend to check the configuration (e.g., to enable modules using deep learning).

To run the container use:

docker run --rm --init -p 8060:8060 -p 8061:8061 -v resources/config/config-docker.yml:/opt/grobid/grobid-quantities/config.yml:ro  lfoppiano/grobid-quantities:0.7.2

The container will respond on port http://localhost:8060, and 8061 for the admin interface.

Local installation

Grobid-quantities requires JDK 1.8 or greater, and Grobid to be installed. Since version 0.7.3 we recommend to use JDK 17 or greater.

First install the latest version of GROBID as explained by the documentation.

Grobid-quantities root directory needs to be placed as sibling sub-project inside Grobid directory:

cp -r grobid-quantities grobid/

The easier is to clone directly within the Grobid directory.

Then, build everything with:

cd PATH-TO-GROBID/grobid-quantities/

./gradlew copyModels
./gradlew clean build

You should have the directories of the models quantities*, units* and values* inside ../grobid-home/models

Run some test:

cd PATH-TO-GROBID/grobid-quantities

./gradlew test

Start and use the service

Grobid-quantities can be run with the following command:

java -Djava.library.path=../grobid-home/lib/{arch}/:{virtual_env_path}/lib:{virtual_env_path}/lib/python3.9/site-packages/jep -jar build/libs/grobid-quantities-{version}-onejar.jar server resources/config/config.yml

Warning

The command requires the following parameters: {arch} is the subdirectory under grobid-home/lib that support the following architectures: lin-64, mac-64, mac_arm-64. {virtual_env_path} is the path to the virtualenv (e.g. in my case is something like /Users/lfoppiano/anaconda3/envs/jep/)

Accessing the service

Grobid-quantitiesa provides a graphical demo accessible at http://localhost:8060, and a REST API, reachable under http://localhost:8060/service and documented in the Rest API Documentation

To test the API, is possible to run a simple text using curl:

curl -X POST -F "text=I've lost two minutes." localhost:8060/service/processQuantityText

Note

The model is designed and trained to work at paragraph level. The expected text input to the parser is a paragraph or a text segment of similar size, not a complete document. In case you have a long textual document, it is better either to exploit existing structures (e.g. XML/HTML <p> elements) to initially segment it into paragraphs or sentences, or to apply an automatic paragraph/sentence segmentation. Then send them separately to grobid-quantities to be processed.

Using the python client

The easiest way to interact with the server is to use the Python Client. It removes the complexity of dealing with the output data, and managing single or multi-thread processing. More information can be found at the Python client GitHub page.