NLTK — the Natural Language Toolkit — is a suite of open source Python
modules, data sets and tutorials supporting research and development
in natural language processing. It comes with 50k lines of code,
300Mb of datasets, and a 360 page book which teaches both Python and
Natural Language Processing. NLTK has been adopted in at least 40
university courses. NLTK is hosted on sourceforge, and is ranked in
the top 200 projects.
http://nltk.sourceforge.net/
Quotes -- what users have said about NLTK:
"... the quite remarkable Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), a wonderful
tool for teaching, and working in, computational linguistics using
Python."
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/li.../l-cpnltk.html
"Natural Language Toolkit (nltk) is an amazing library to play with
natural language."
http://www.biais.org/blog/index.php/...e-toolkit-nltk
"... a wonderful lightweight framework that provides a wealth of NLP tools."
http://harnly.net/2007/blog/geek/lan...ds-variations/
"A good place to start for those learning about NLP for the first
time, this has been used in many academic situations. It is extremely
well documented, with tutorials which not only explain the tool, but
also give an overview of the subject (eg document clustering). I was
able to go from downloading it for the first time, to creating and
training a 2004 Task 1A system (bigram gene name tagger) in about and
hour."
http://compbio.uchsc.edu/corpora/bcresources.html
"Students with no previous programming experience will be able to
spend more of their time thinking about the logical steps involved in
getting the computer to process language data, and less time mastering
and using the arcana involved in getting the computer to do anything
at all."
http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-3165.html
Steven Bird
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/
