🚀 Natural Language Understanding Sample Application

This Node.js app demonstrates some of the Natural Language Understanding service features.

Natural Language Understanding is a collection of APIs that offer text analysis through natural language processing. This set of APIs can analyze text to help you understand its concepts, entities, keywords, sentiment, and more. Additionally, you can create a custom model for some APIs to get specific results that are tailored to your domain.

Prerequisites

1. Sign up for an IBM Cloud account.
2. Download the IBM Cloud CLI.
3. Create an instance of the Natural Language Understanding service and get your credentials:
   • Go to the Natural Language Understanding page in the IBM Cloud Catalog.
   • Log in to your IBM Cloud account.
   • Click Create.
   • Click Show to view the service credentials.
   • Copy the apikey value, or copy the username and password values if your service instance doesn't provide an apikey.
   • Copy the url value.

Configuring the application

1. In the application folder, copy the .env.example file and create a file called .env

   cp .env.example .env
   

2. Open the .env file and add the service credentials that you obtained in the previous step.

   Example .env file that configures the apikey and url for a Natural Language Understanding service instance hosted in the US East region:

   NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_IAM_APIKEY=X4rbi8vwZmKpXfowaS3GAsA7vdy17Qh7km5D6EzKLHL2
   NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_URL=https://gateway-wdc.watsonplatform.net/natural-language-understanding/api
   

   • If your service instance uses username and password credentials, add the NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_USERNAME and NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_PASSWORD variables to the .env file.

   Example .env file that configures the username, password, and url for a Natural Language Understanding service instance hosted in the Sydney region:

   NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_USERNAME=522be-7b41-ab44-dec3-g1eab2ha73c6
   NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_PASSWORD=A4Z5BdGENrwu8
   NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_URL=https://gateway-syd.watsonplatform.net/natural-language-understanding/api
   

Running locally

1. Install the dependencies

   npm install
   

2. Run the application

   npm start
   

3. View the application in a browser at localhost:3000

Deploying to IBM Cloud as a Cloud Foundry Application

1. Login to IBM Cloud with the IBM Cloud CLI

   ibmcloud login
   

2. Target a Cloud Foundry organization and space.

   ibmcloud target --cf
   

3. Edit the manifest.yml file. Change the name field to something unique.
   For example, - name: my-app-name.

4. Deploy the application

   ibmcloud app push
   

5. View the application online at the app URL.
   For example: https://my-app-name.mybluemix.net

Directory structure

.
├── app.js                      // express routes
├── config                      // express configuration
│   ├── express.js
│   └── security.js
├── manifest.yml
├── package.json
├── public                      // static resources
├── server.js                   // entry point
├── test                        // tests
└── views                       // react components

License

This sample code is licensed under Apache 2.0.
Full license text is available in LICENSE.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.

Open Source @ IBM

Find more open source projects on the IBM Github Page.