LINGUIST List 14.3015

Wed Nov 5 2003

Software: NLTK 1.2: Natural Language Processing

Editor for this issue: Neil Salmond <neillinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Edward Loper, NLTK 1.2: Natural Language Processing

NLTK version 1.2 is now available on SourceForge:

http://nltk.sourceforge.net

NLTK, the Natural Language Toolkit, is a suite of Python libraries and
programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing.
NLTK includes graphical demonstrations and sample data. It is
accompanied by extensive documentation, including tutorials that
explain the underlying concepts behind the language processing tasks
supported by the toolkit.

NLTK is ideally suited to students who are learning NLP (natural
language processing) or conducting research in NLP or closely related
areas, including empirical linguistics, cognitive science, artificial
intelligence, information retrieval, and machine learning. NLTK has
been used successfully as a teaching tool, as an individual study
tool, and as a platform for prototyping and building research systems.

NLTK version 1.2 adds:
 - 4 new datasets that are useful for developing and testing
 NLP tools, along with tokenizers and parsers to provide a
 high-level interface to the datasets.
 - Improvements to the graphical chart parser demo.
 - Improvements to the sequential tagger.
 - Several new third-party contributions, including a boosting
 classifier, a decision list, a decision tree, an implementation
 of Lesk's dictionary-based tagger, an interface to WordNet,
 and an interface to Babelfish.

For a complete list of improvements, see the change log:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=195624