baküzen

The Python Natural Language Tool Kit has a lot of stuff to offer the DIY NLPer. It has a parser, POS tagger, lambda calculus, a chunker, a classifier, a tokenizer, even a WordNet interface, and much, much…..much more. It’s loaded and it’s not terribly difficult to use granted you know some python and at least a little bit about NLP.

First, you need python, the programming language in which that the tool kit is developed. Most distros of Linux will have python installed, but if you don’t have it you can go to www.python.org to get it and download it. If you don’t know how to do that, you’re hard-pressed to know how to use the tool kit anyway. So, spend some time learning python before you go crazy with the tool kit.

If you’re beyond that and you’re ready for the tool kit, you can go to www.nltk.org and download it. I tried a few different things and ended up just getting the zip file and downloading that, extracting it, then go into the directory with your console and type (as root or sudo):

python setup.py install

and you’re almost done. Run python by just typing:

python

and you’ll see the python command-line interpreter interface. Type:

include nltk
nltk.probability.demo()

and you should see some output with some frequency distributions. There are more tutorials on how to use the tools individually on the www.nltk.org website.

One more thing. You might want to include some of the other optional packages, like numpy. Go back to the same download site as the nltk and grab what you want.  Open a console and get to where you downloaded the file,then run:

tar -xvf numpy[ver]

Then go into your numpy directory and run (again, as root/sudo):

python setup.py install

It will take some time because it is also compiling a lot of c code. Best of luck. I’ll post more as I learn more about it.