Greetings, I would greatly appreciate anyone sharing their experience doing NLP/lemmatization and am also very curious to gauge the opinion of the lucene community regarding open-nlp. I know there are a few other libraries out there, some of which can’t be directly included in the lucene project because of licensing issues. If anyone has any suggestions/experiences, please do share them :-) As a side note I’ll add that I’ve been experimenting with open-nlp’s PoS/lemmatization capabilities via lucene’s integration. During the process I uncovered some issues which made me question whether open-nlp is the right tool for the job. The first issue was a “low-hanging bug”, which would have most likely been addressed sooner if this solution was popular, this simple bug was at least 5 years old -> https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/11771
Second issue has more to do with the open-nlp library itself. It is not thread-safe in some very unexpected ways. Looking at the library internals reveals unsynchronized lazy initialization of shared components. Unfortunately the lucene integration kind of sweeps this under the rug by wrapping everything in a pretty big synchronized block, here is an example https://github.com/apache/lucene/blob/main/lucene/analysis/opennlp/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/opennlp/tools/NLPPOSTaggerOp.java#L36 . This itself is problematic because these functions run in really tight loops and probably shouldn’t be blocking. Even if one did decide to do blocking initialization, it can still be done at a much lower level than currently. From what I gather, the functions that are synchronized at the lucene-level could be made thread-safe in a much more performant way if they were fixed in open-nlp. But I am also starting to doubt if this is worth pursuing since I don't know whether anyone would find this useful, hence the original inquiry. I’ll add that I have separately used the open-nlp sentence break iterator (which suffers from the same problem https://github.com/apache/lucene/blob/main/lucene/analysis/opennlp/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/opennlp/tools/NLPSentenceDetectorOp.java#L39 ) at production scale and discovered really bad performance during certain conditions which I attribute to this unnecessary synching. I suspect this may have impacted others as well https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42960569/indexing-taking-long-time-when-using-opennlp-lemmatizer-with-solr Many thanks, Luke Kot-Zaniewski
