NLTK Trees

A number of NLTK functions work with Tree objects. For example, part of speech tagging and chunking classifiers, naturally return trees. Sentence manipulation functions also work with trees. Although Natural Language Processing with Python (Bird et al) includes a couple of pages about NLTK’s Tree module, coverage is generally sparse. The online documentation actually contains ...

Part of Speech Tags

A frequently asked question is “What do the Part of Speech tags (VB, JJ, etc) mean?” The bottom line is that these tags mean whatever they meant in your original training data. You are free to invent your own tags in your training data, as long as you are consistent in their usage. Training data ...

Support for SciPy in NLTK’s Maximum Entropy methods

Recently I have been working with the Maximum Entropy classifiers in NLTK. Maximum entropy models are similar to the well known Naive Bayes models but they allow for independence between the features – i.e. they are not “naive”. SciPy has had some problems with its Maximum Entropy code, and v0.8 must be used. v0.9 crashes ...