robertdigital / grobid-client-python

Simple python client for GROBID REST services

Simple python client for GROBID REST services

This Python client can be used to process in an efficient concurrent manner a set of PDF in a given directory by the GROBID service. Results are written in a given output directory and include the resulting XML TEI representation of the PDF.

Build and run

You need first to install and start the grobid service, latest stable version, see the documentation. It is assumed that the server will run on the address http://localhost:8070. You can change the server address by editing the file config.json.

Requirements

This client has been developed and tested with Python 3.5.

Install

Get the github repo:

git clone https://github.com/kermitt2/grobid-client-python

cd grobid-client-python

It is advised to setup first a virtual environment to avoid falling into one of these gloomy python dependency marshlands:

virtualenv --system-site-packages -p python3 env

source env/bin/activate

Usage and options

usage: grobid-client.py [-h] [--input INPUT] [--config CONFIG]
                        [--output OUTPUT] [--n N]
                        service

Client for GROBID services

positional arguments:
  service          one of [processFulltextDocument, processHeaderDocument,
                   processReferences]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --input INPUT    path to the directory containing PDF to process
  --output OUTPUT  path to the directory where to put the results
  --config CONFIG  path to the config file, default is ./config.json
  --n N            Concurrency for service usage

Example:

python3 grobid-client.py --input ~/tmp/in2 --output ~/tmp/out processFulltextDocument

This command will process all the PDF files present in the input directory (files with extension .pdf only) with the processFulltextDocument service of GROBID, and write the resulting XML TEI files under the output directory, reusing the file name with a different file extension (.tei.xml), using the default 10 concurrent workers.

python3 grobid-client.py --input ~/tmp/in2 --output ~/tmp/out --n 20 processHeaderDocument

This command will process all the PDF files present in the input directory (files with extension .pdf only) with the processHeaderDocument service of GROBID, and write the resulting XML TEI files under the output directory, reusing the file name with a different file extension (.tei.xml), using 20 concurrent workers.

Benchmarking

Full text processing of 136 PDF (total 3443 pages, in average 25 pages per PDF) on Intel Core i7-4790K CPU 4.00GHz, 4 cores (8 threads), 16GB memory, n being the concurrency parameter:

n	runtime (s)	s/PDF
1	209.0	1.54
2	112.0	0.82
3	80.4	0.59
5	62.9	0.46
8	55.7	0.41
10	55.3	0.40

As complementary info, GROBID processing of header, with of the 136 PDF and with n=10 takes 3.74 s (15 times faster than the complete full text processing because only the two first pages of the PDF are considered). In similar conditions, extraction and structuring of bibliographical references takes 26.9 s.

Todo

Benchmarking with more files (e.g. million ISTEX PDF). Also implement existing GROBID services for text input (date, name, affiliation/address, raw bibliographical references, etc.). Better support for parameters (including elements where to put coordinates).

License and contact

Distributed under Apache 2.0 license.

Main author and contact: Patrice Lopez ([email protected])