Using Lucene and Cascalog for Fast Text Processing at Scale
From the post:
Here at Yieldbot we do a lot of text processing of analytics data. In order to accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time, we use Cascalog, a data processing and querying library for Hadoop; written in Clojure. Since Cascalog is Clojure, you can develop and test queries right inside of the Clojure REPL. This allows you to iteratively develop processing workflows with extreme speed. Because Cascalog queries are just Clojure code, you can access everything Clojure has to offer, without having to implement any domain specific APIs or interfaces for custom processing functions. When combined with Clojure’s awesome Java Interop, you can do quite complex things very simply and succinctly.
Many great Java libraries already exist for text processing, e.g., Lucene, OpenNLP, LingPipe, Stanford NLP. Using Cascalog allows you take advantage of these existing libraries with very little effort, leading to much shorter development cycles.
By way of example, I will show how easy it is to combine Lucene and Cascalog to do some (simple) text processing. You can find the entire code used in the examples over on Github.
The world of text exploration just gets better all the time!