Java Command Fails in NLTK Stanford POS Tagger

Question

I request your kind help and assistance in solving the error of "Java Command Fails" which keeps throwing whenever I try to tag an Arabic corpus with size of 2 megabytes. I have searched the web and stanford POS tagger mailing list. However, I did not find the solution. I read some posts on problems similar to this, and it was suggested that the memory is used out. I am not sure of that. Still I have 19GB free memory. I tried every possible solution offered, but the same error keeps showing.

I have average command on Python and good command on Linux. I am using LinuxMint17 KDE 64-bit, Python3.4, NLTK alpha and Stanford POS tagger model for Arabic . This is my code:

import nltk
from nltk.tag.stanford import POSTagger
arabic_postagger = POSTagger("/home/mohammed/postagger/models/arabic.tagger", "/home/mohammed/postagger/stanford-postagger.jar", encoding='utf-8')

print("Executing tag_corpus.py...\n")


# Import corpus file
print("Importing data...\n")

file = open("test.txt", 'r', encoding='utf-8').read()
text = file.strip()

print("Tagging the corpus. Please wait...\n")

tagged_corpus = arabic_postagger.tag(nltk.word_tokenize(text))

IF THE CORPUS SIZE IS LESS THAN 1MB ( = 100,000 words), THERE WILL BE NO ERROR. BUT WHEN I TRY TO TAG 2MB CORPUS, THEN THE FOLLOWING ERROR MESSAGE IS SHOWN:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/mohammed/experiments/current/tag_corpus2.py", line 17, in <module>
tagged_lst = arabic_postagger.tag(nltk.word_tokenize(text))
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/nltk-3.0a3-py3.4.egg/nltk/tag/stanford.py", line 59, in tag
return self.batch_tag([tokens])[0]
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/nltk-3.0a3-py3.4.egg/nltk/tag/stanford.py", line 81, in batch_tag
stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/nltk-3.0a3-py3.4.egg/nltk/internals.py", line 171, in java
raise OSError('Java command failed!')
OSError: Java command failed!

I intend to tag 300 Million words to be used in my Ph.D. research project. If I keep tagging 100 thousand words at a time, I will have to repeat the task 3000 times. It will kill me!

I really appreciate your kind help.

Answer 1

After your import lines add this line:

nltk.internals.config_java(options='-xmx2G')

This will increase the maximum RAM size that java allows Stanford POS Tagger to use. The '-xmx2G' changes the maximum allowable RAM to 2GB instead of the default 512MB.

See What are the Xms and Xmx parameters when starting JVMs? for more information

---

If you're interested in how to debug your code, read on.

So we see that the command fail when handling huge amount of data so the first thing to look at is how the Java is initialized in NLTK before calling the Stanford tagger, from https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/develop/nltk/tag/stanford.py#L19 :

from nltk.internals import find_file, find_jar, config_java, java, _java_options

We see that the nltk.internals package is handling the different Java configurations and parameters.

Then we take a look at https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/develop/nltk/internals.py#L65 and we see that the no value is added for the memory allocation for Java.

Answer 2

In version 3.9.2, the StanfordTagger class constructor accepts a parameter called java_options which can be used to set the memory for the POSTagger and also the NERTagger.

E.g. pos_tagger = StanfordPOSTagger('models/english-bidirectional-distsim.tagger', path_to_jar='stanford-postagger-3.9.2.jar', java_options='-mx3g')

I found the answer by @alvas to not work because the StanfordTagger was overriding my memory setting with the built-in default of 1000m. Perhaps using nltk.internals.config_java after initializing StanfordPOSTagger might work but I haven't tried that.