NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a powerful library for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 200 corpora and lexical resources, along with a suite of text processing libraries for tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and more.
Key Features
- 📚 Comprehensive Corpora: Access to datasets like the Brown Corpus, Gutenberg Corpus, and more
- 🔍 Lexical Tools: WordNet, a lexical database, and tools for synonym/antonym detection
- 🧩 Text Processing: Tokenization, POS tagging, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis
- 🌐 Language Support: Tools for multiple languages including English, Chinese, and Spanish
Use Cases
- 📝 Sentiment analysis of social media texts
- 🧠 NLP research and prototyping
- 📖 Educational purposes for learning NLP concepts
Installation
pip install nltk
Example Code
import nltk
nltk.download('punkt')
nltk.download('wordnet')
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
text = "NLTK is a versatile library for NLP tasks."
tokens = word_tokenize(text)
filtered = [word for word in tokens if word not in stopwords.words('english')]
print(filtered)
Resources
- NLTK Official Documentation for advanced features
- Python NLP Libraries Guide to compare tools