Natural Language Processing in PHP

Question

Given, say, a recipe (list of ingredients, steps, etc.) in free text form, how could I parse that in such a way I can pull out the ingredients (e.g. quantity, unit of measurements, ingredient name, etc.) usin PHP?

Assume that the free text is somewhat formatted.

Answer 1

To do it 'properly', you need to define some sort of grammar, and then maybe use a LALR parser or some tools such as yacc, bison or Lex to build a parser. Assuming you dont want to do that, its strpos() ftw!

Answer 2

There is openNlp in java for name entity extraction which can fetch you what you are looking see this : http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/models-1.5/

Then you can use php-java connector to get results into php.

Answer 3

There's very similar question for Java. In short, you need dictionaries (of, say, ingredients) and regex-like language over terms (annotations). You can do it in Java and invoke it from PHP via web service or you can try to re-implement it in PHP (note, that in second case you may have significant slowdown).