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Flask NLP microservice

** NOTE: Empathy, TenDims success and Complexity are NOT currently available **

It is not uncommon that researchers or data scientists need to run some ML tool, and often it's multiple people in the same team. So I spent some time whipping up a decently-structured and modular Flask-based server that can receive:

  • A single string
  • A list of strings
  • A file with a specified text column

I am no security expert so I did what I could and so the server supports:

  • E2EE encryption with a Diffie-Hellman key-exchange
  • The encryption works on both files and strings
  • The data is encrypted with a "simple" XOR algorithm, nothing too fancy

At the moment, this server implemented the following GET end-points:

  • /request-keys: It returns a pair private and public key
  • /request-shared-key Given a local_private_key and a remote_public_key it returns a shared_key

The ML models can be called through these POST end-points:

  • /getStats: Calculates scores from all the available ML end-points for the text (or list of texts) in text and their ids in text_id
  • /getStatsFile: Same as above but for files. Need to specify a txt_col_name
  • /tenDimensions: Calculates the TenDimensions link to github repo for the text (or list of texts) in text and their ids in text_id
  • /complexity: Calculates Integrative Complexity (IC), from the paper "The Languge of Dialogue is Complex" from Alexander Robertson, Luca Maria Aielloand Daniele Quercia ARXIV link, made publicly available at https://social-dynamics.net/ic/ and LIWC scores (from python packages liwc and nltk) for the text (or list of texts) in text and their ids in text_id
  • /sentiment: Calculates the sentiment scores through FlairNLP for the text (or list of texts) in text and their ids in text_id
  • /empathy: Calculates the Empathy as from the paper "The Language of Situational Empathy" from Ke Zhou, Luca Maria Aiello, Sanja Scepanovic, Daniele Quercia, Sara Konrath link for the text (or list of texts) in text and their ids in text_id

At the moment the complexity and the empathy models are not publicly availabe.

The TenDimensions embeddings need to be downloaded from:

  1. Word2Vec: the file GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.wv should be placed in the directory embeddings/word2vec. Download it from: https://code.google.com/archive/p/word2vec/
  2. Fasttext: the file wiki-news-300d-1M-subword.wv should be placed in the directory embeddings/fasttext. Download it from: https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/english-vectors.html
  3. GloVe: the file wiki-news-300d-1M-subword.wv should be placed in the directory embeddings/fasttext. Download it from: https://fasttext.cc/docs/en/english-vectors.html

I started implementing a socket-based communication but it's not working yet.

How to run the server

Running the server is fairly simple:

  1. Copy one of the yaml config files config5000.yaml for instance, it should look something like:
upload_folder: "./upload_files_5000/"
ip: "0.0.0.0"
port: 5000
use_ten_dims: False
log_filename: "flask_5000.log"
  1. run the flask app as sudo python nlp_flask_server.py -c config5000.yaml. You can also run this with gunicorn as: sudo gunicorn3 --preload -b 0.0.0.0:5000 wsgi:app

You can run this as a service: sudo nohup sudo sudo python nlp_flask_server.py -c config5000.yaml & or sudo nohup sudo gunicorn3 --preload -b 0.0.0.0:5000 wsgi:app &

I use preload since the models take a while to load and it often ends up timing out the main gunicorn worker.

You can customise the nubmer of threads you want to use (not sure about workers as they create multiple processed and each one of them reloads the models...)

sudo nohup sudo gunicorn3 --preload -b 0.0.0.0:5000 --threads=10 wsgi:app &

If you then want to kill it from the background: call: ps -ef | grep python or ps -ef | grep gun find the Procedd ID (PID) and then sudo kill [PID] or sudo pkill -P [PID]

Gunicorn might have issues if you pass the argument -c config5000.yaml So if using gunicorn I'd suggest to just remove the argument parsing part and load a known yaml config file instead.

How to run the client

The client is even simpler. I wrapped everything in a class ready to be used in nlp_flask_client.py. The client is ready to send:

  • Text
  • List of texts
  • Dataframes
  • Files

Encrypt them, send them to the server. Receive the response, decrypt it and store it. The client is also multi-threaded and can automatically split the dataframe in chunks to be sent out to the server. It will automatically append the result to the dataframe, no need to specify the columns. It will automatically add any new column and keep the original ones. The output is a COPY of the original dataframe, not an updated dataframe.

  1. Check analyse_data.py and change it to your needs

Analysing text is as easy as:

from nlp_flask_client import NLPClient
import pandas as pd

client = NLPClient(IP, PORT)
client.analyse_file(csv_filename, "msg_text") # Upload the csv file and get a new csv file back
client.analyse_dataframe(pd.read_csv(csv_filename), 'msg_text', multi_threaded=True, multi_messages=True, threads_no=20, rows_per_call=20) # Analyse the dataframe row by row or in chunks

How to add new models

This was the main point of this project. I wanted this to be easy to update and to add new pre-trained models to the server. The process is fairly simple:

  1. Add your new model code and import it in the nlp_flask_server.py
  2. In the Engine class, add the model file loading code in the constructor
  3. Add the model name in the Models class
  4. Register the model's prediction function in the Engine class as:
self.register_model(Engine.Models.ModelName, self.model.get_prediction)

Or alternatively, if your model needs multiple calls and some data wrangling, you can write a middle-ware function in the Engine class and register it as:

self.register_model(Engine.Models.ModelName, self.get_prediction)
  1. Add a middle function in the Engine class that calls your model for a text string. Something like:

Make sure that the method you register returns a dictionary (not a list). As the result dictionary will update itself from the values returned from the model.

  1. Add a new @app.route("/whatever", methods=['POST']) and define a new function underneath with code that looks like this:
ret_data, code = engine.call_model_from_request(request, Engine.Models.ModelName, app.logger)
  1. And that's it! Restart the server and test it out from the client!