Orolo

Yet another natural language dates parser for JavaScript with a focus on understanding dates and date ranges in a sentence. Orolo is an aggressive parser designed to work on sentenses that are known to contain dates.

Why

There are very good NLP date parses for JavaScript:

• chrono
• date
• recognizers-date-time

There are also strong general purpose NLP frameworks that some with pre-build named entity recognition for dates:

• compromise
• natural

Unfortunately, I couldn't find one that would properly understand these sentences:

• Will be in New York on May 5th, 6th, and 7th
• Will be in London from june third till june sixth
• I was in SFO this past Tue and Wed

and that's how orolo was born.

Install

npm install --save orolo

Usage

const { Orolo } = require('orolo');

const orolo = new Orolo();
const dates = orolo.recognize(
  'I will be in New York next week Tuesday and also Friday'
);

If you know that the dates in the sentence are not relative to today:

const context = new Date('2018-05-01');
const dates = orolo.recognize(
  'I am not available next week Mon - Wed',
  context
);

How It Works

Orolo works in two stages. First, it parses the sentence looking for date tokens. Then it computes the tokens by arranging them into a computable sequence.

Locales

Right now orolo only supports English but it is designed to support other languages as well. You will need to implement the ILocale interface. The best way to do it at the moment is to take a look at how EnglishLocale is implemented. In short, you specify how to tokenize a sentence, you also specify how many language tokens (words) can a date token span, and then you implement token detectors for each token type that orolo supports.

Aggressive Parsing

Orolo takes everything that looks like a valid date token and then attempts to compute a date. The following two sentenses will compute down to May 5th:

It happened on May 5
I bought 5 shirts in May

There is no logic currently to look at either dependency graph or proximity of tokens to each other.

Parsed Sequence

If you would like to take advantage of parsing logic but don't want/need orolo to compute the dates:

const { parse, EnglishLocale } = require('orolo');
const sequence = parse(
  'I will be in New York next week Tuesday and also Friday',
  new EnglishLocale()
);

// sequence.tokens will return an Array of parsed tokens