How to set base timestamp for relative date parsing in NLPCraft?

Question

I'm working with nlpcraft to build a parsing system for scheduling. Users are asked when they will be doing certain activities and they can respond with relative or absolute dates, such as "tuesday and wednesday" or "not until 8/15".

While nlpcraft has very nice relative date parsing, near as I can tell it always parses dates relative to the current system time in UTC. Not only does this complicate testing (because the input is relative while the output is absolute), it means that if the server does not parse the input close to the time the user wrote it, relative dates may be parsed incorrectly. For example, if the user says "tomorrow" at 11PM on a Sunday, but the server doesn't parse it until 5AM on Monday, it might result in Tuesday instead of Monday.

I looked into NCDateEnricher where this all seems to happen and then parsing routine computes a base time as the current system time. I didn't see a way to override this with a config variable or request parameter -- am I missing something?

Answer 1

1. UTC time server on server-side allows users to easily convert times to local timezone. It's the simplest way to support different timezone users with one server.
2. If you aren't satisfied with nlpcart provided date NER, you can look at date/time NERS from opennlp/stanford/spacy/google, which can be simply used with nlpcraft system (https://nlpcraft.incubator.apache.org/integrations.html)