Parse sentence Stanford Parser by passing String not an array of strings

Question

Is it possible to parse a sentence using the Stanford Parser by passing a string and not an array of strings. This is the example they gave in their short tutorial (See Docs) :

Here's example:

    import java.util.*;
    import edu.stanford.nlp.ling.*;
    import edu.stanford.nlp.trees.*;
    import edu.stanford.nlp.parser.lexparser.LexicalizedParser;

    class ParserDemo {
      public static void main(String[] args) {
        LexicalizedParser lp = LexicalizedParser.loadModel("edu/stanford/nlp/models/lexparser/englishPCFG.ser.gz");
        lp.setOptionFlags(new String[]{"-maxLength", "80", "-retainTmpSubcategories"});

        String[] sent = { "This", "is", "an", "easy", "sentence", "." }; // This is the sentence to be parsed
        List<CoreLabel> rawWords = Sentence.toCoreLabelList(sent);
        Tree parse = lp.apply(rawWords);
        parse.pennPrint();
        System.out.println();

        TreebankLanguagePack tlp = new PennTreebankLanguagePack();
        GrammaticalStructureFactory gsf = tlp.grammaticalStructureFactory();
        GrammaticalStructure gs = gsf.newGrammaticalStructure(parse);
        List<TypedDependency> tdl = gs.typedDependenciesCCprocessed();
        System.out.println(tdl);
        System.out.println();

      }

}

I am trying to see if I can do this because I need to get sentences from a MySQL database and parse them directly as strings. I could tokezine the sentences and add the words, commas, and period to a String Array, However, to tokenize these sentences, I would have to use the Stanford Tokenizer , PTBTokenizer. The constructor of this tokenizer as listed here

(See Docs)

requires a "java.io.FileReader" Object, but I am not reading a file from directory. So I am wondering if there is a way to either Parse the sentence directly by passing a string, or if I can solve my problem by tokenizing the sentence without requiring a "java.io.FileReader" Object.

Answer 1

For simple usage, with the default tokenizer and default tokenizer options for a grammar, there is an easy convenience method you can use:

lp.parse(String)

But the PTBTokenizer methods that you point at don't take a FileReader, they just take a Reader, so you can also easily point a PTBTokenizer at a String by wrapping the String in a StringReader. This is the right approach if you need more control over how tokenization happens.