/ 
Text-Corpus-NewYorkTimes-1.01
River stage zero No dependents
/ Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes

NAME

Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes - Interface to New York Times corpus.

SYNOPSIS

use Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes;
use Data::Dump qw(dump);
use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy);
Log::Log4perl->easy_init ($INFO);
my $corpus = Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes->new (fileList => $fileList, corpusDirectory => $corpusDirectory);
dump $corpus->getTotalDocuments;

DESCRIPTION

Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes provides an interface for accessing the documents in the New York Times corpus from Linguistic Data Consortium. The categories, description, title, etc... of a specified document are accessed using Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes::Document. Also, all errors and warnings are logged using Log::Log4perl, which should be initialized.

CONSTRUCTOR

new

The method new creates an instance of the Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes class with the following parameters:

corpusDirectory
corpusDirectory => '...'

corpusDirectory is the path to the top most directory of the corpus; it usually is the path to the directory named nyt_corpus. It is needed to locate all the documents in the corpus. If it is not defined, then the enviroment variable TEXT_CORPUS_NEWYORKTIMES_CORPUSDIRECTORY is used if it is defined; if neither of these are defined then all the paths in the file specified by fileList are assumed to be full path names. corpusDirectory and fileList can both be defined to locate the documents in the corpus by having the path names in fileList be defined relative to corpusDirectory.

fileList
fileList => '...'

fileList is an optional parameter that can be used to save time when creating the list of documents in the corpus; each line in the file must be the path to an XML document in the corpus. If fileList is not defined, then the environment variable TEXT_CORPUS_NEWYORKTIMES_FILELIST is used if it is defined; otherwise all the XML documents in the corpus are located by searching the directory specified by corpusDirectory. If the file defined by fileList or TEXT_CORPUS_NEWYORKTIMES_FILELIST does not exist, it will be created and the path to each XML document in the corpus, relative to corpusDirectory, will be written to it. This is done to speed-up subsequent invocations of the object.

METHODS

getDocument

getDocument (index => $documentIndex)
getDocument (uri => $uri)

getDocument returns a Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes::Document object for the document with index $documentIndex or uri $uri. The document indices range from zero to getTotalDocument()-1; getDocument returns undef if any errors occurred and logs them using Log::Log4perl.

For example:

use Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes;
use Data::Dump qw(dump);
use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy);
Log::Log4perl->easy_init ($INFO);
my $corpus = Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes->new (fileList => $fileList, corpusDirectory => $corpusDirectory);
my $document = $corpus->getDocument (index => 0);
dump $document->getBody;
dump $document->getCategories;
dump $document->getContent;
dump $document->getDate;
dump $document->getTitle;
dump $document->getUri;

getTotalDocuments

getTotalDocuments ()

getTotalDocuments returns the total number of documents in the corpus. The index to the documents in the corpus ranges from zero to getTotalDocuments() - 1.

test

test ()

test does tests to ensure the documents in the corpus are accessible and can be parsed. It returns true if all tests pass, otherwise a description of the test that failed is logged using Log::Log4perl and false is returned.

For example:

use Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes;
use Data::Dump qw(dump);
use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy);
Log::Log4perl->easy_init ($INFO);
my $corpus = Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes->new (fileList => $fileList, corpusDirectory => $corpusDirectory);
dump $corpus->test;

EXAMPLES

The example below will print out all the information for each document in the corpus.

use Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes;
use Data::Dump qw(dump);
use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy);
Log::Log4perl->easy_init ($INFO);
my $corpus = Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes->new (fileList => $fileList, corpusDirectory => $corpusDirectory);
my $totalDocuments = $corpus->getTotalDocuments;

for (my $i = 0; $i < $totalDocuments; $i++)
{
  eval
    {
      my $document = $corpus->getDocument(index => $i);
      next unless defined $document;
      my %documentInfo;
      $documentInfo{title} = $document->getTitle();
      $documentInfo{body} = $document->getBody();
      $documentInfo{content} = $document->getContent();
      $documentInfo{categories} = $document->getCategories();
      $documentInfo{description} = $document->getDescription();
      $documentInfo{uri} = $document->getUri();
      dump \%documentInfo;
    };
}

INSTALLATION

To install the module set the environment variable TEXT_CORPUS_NEWYORKTIMES_CORPUSDIRECTORY to the path of the New York Times corpus and run the following commands:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

If you are on a windows box you should use 'nmake' rather than 'make'.

The module will install if TEXT_CORPUS_NEWYORKTIMES_CORPUSDIRECTORY is not defined, but less testing will be performed. After the New York Times corpus is installed testing of the module can be performed by running:

use Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes;
use Data::Dump qw(dump);
use Log::Log4perl qw(:easy);
Log::Log4perl->easy_init ($INFO);
my $corpus = Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes->new (corpusDirectory => $corpusDirectory);
dump $corpus->test;

AUTHOR

Jeff Kubina<jeff.kubina@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2009 Jeff Kubina. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.

KEYWORDS

nyt, new york times, english corpus, information processing

SEE ALSO

This module requires the The New York Times Annotated Corpus from the Linguistic Data Consortium; discussions about the corpus are moderated at the Google Group called The New York Times Annotated Corpus Community.

Log::Log4perl, Text::Corpus::NewYorkTimes::Document