stanfordnlp/CoreNLP · error · RuntimeException

Exception reading key file + sentFileName

Error message

Exception reading key file  + sentFileName

What it means

In SemanticGraphPrinter.main, any Exception raised while reading and parsing the sentence file (tokenizer, parser, I/O) is wrapped in RuntimeException("Exception reading key file " + sentFileName). It is a generic failure wrapper indicating the key-file reading loop crashed.

Solutions

1. Inspect the wrapped cause (e.getCause()) to find the real failure
2. Validate the input file is plain text in the expected encoding (UTF-8) before running
3. Test the parser on individual sentences to isolate the offending line
4. Catch RuntimeException around the reader and process the file line-by-line with per-line error handling

Example fix

// before
printerMain(new String[]{sentFileName}); // crashes whole run on bad line
// after
try {
  printerMain(new String[]{sentFileName});
} catch (RuntimeException e) {
  logger.warning("Key file failed: " + e.getCause());
}

if (sentFileName != null && new File(sentFileName).canRead()) { ... }

try { printerMain(args); } catch (RuntimeException e) { log.severe("Key file processing failed: " + e.getCause()); }

When it happens

Trigger: Malformed sentence text that crashes the LexicalizedParser, an I/O error mid-read (disk, encoding), or any runtime exception inside the per-line parse loop.

Common situations: Empty or binary/corrupt input files, unsupported character encodings, parser model issues surfacing on specific sentences.

Understand the failure class

Background: "failed to read file", EACCES, ENOENT and "could not read <path>" errors: when a program can't read a file from disk — this error's family across 49 libraries.

Related errors

• Error creating data exporter
• Dataset could not be loaded
• Error loading classifier from
• edu.stanford.nlp.io.RuntimeIOException
• Bad data format:

AI-assisted analysis of stanfordnlp/CoreNLP@1b7edd19c4 (2026-09-10). Data as JSON: /api/errors/3ccbcc94d6e5d98c. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at src/edu/stanford/nlp/semgraph/SemanticGraphPrinter.java:79

      LexicalizedParser lp = LexicalizedParser.loadModel("/u/nlp/data/lexparser/englishPCFG.ser.gz", options);
      BufferedReader reader = null;
      try {
        reader = IOUtils.readerFromString(sentFileName);
      } catch (IOException e) {
        throw new RuntimeIOException("Cannot find or open " + sentFileName, e);
      }
      try {
        System.out.println("Processing sentence file " + sentFileName);
        for  (String line; (line = reader.readLine()) != null; ) {
          System.out.println("Processing sentence: " + line);
          PTBTokenizer<Word> ptb = PTBTokenizer.newPTBTokenizer(new StringReader(line));
          List<Word> words = ptb.tokenize();
          Tree parseTree = lp.parseTree(words);
          tb.add(parseTree);
        }
        reader.close();
      } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new RuntimeException("Exception reading key file " + sentFileName, e);
      }
    }

    for (Tree t : tb) {
      SemanticGraph sg = SemanticGraphFactory.generateUncollapsedDependencies(t);
      System.out.println(sg.toString());
      System.out.println(sg.toCompactString());

      if (testGraph.equals("true")) {
        SemanticGraph g1 = SemanticGraphFactory.generateCollapsedDependencies(t);
        System.out.println("TEST SEMANTIC GRAPH - graph ----------------------------");
        System.out.println(g1.toString());
        System.out.println("readable ----------------------------");
        System.out.println(g1.toString(SemanticGraph.OutputFormat.READABLE));
        System.out.println("List of dependencies ----------------------------");
        System.out.println(g1.toList());
        System.out.println("xml ----------------------------");
        System.out.println(g1.toString(SemanticGraph.OutputFormat.XML));

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