Natural language processing (NLP) is an exciting field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. It includes word and sentence tokenization, text classification and sentiment analysis, spelling correction, information extraction, parsing, meaning extraction, and question answering.
In our formative years, we master the basics of spoken and written language. However, the vast majority of us do not progress past some basic processing rules when we learn how to handle text in our applications. Yet unstructured software comprises the majority of the data we see. NLP is the technology for dealing with our all-pervasive product: human language, as it appears in social media, emails, web pages, tweets, product descriptions, newspaper stories, and scientific articles, in thousands of languages and variants.
Many challenges in NLP involve natural language understanding. In other words, computers learn how to determine meaning from human or natural language input, and others involve natural language generation.
Python and R stand toe-to-toe in data science. But in the field of NLP, Python stands very tall. The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) for Python is an awesome library and set of corpuses.
Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion here.
Click the links in the table to learn more about each program.
| Python Natural Language Processing Tools | |
|---|---|
| PyTorch-Transformers | Library of state-of-the-art pre-trained models for NLP |
| NLTK | Natural Language Toolkit |
| spaCy | Industrial strength natural language processing |
| scikit-learn | Machine learning library |
| Gensim | Vector space modeling and topic modeling toolkit |
| flair | Simple framework for state-of-the-art NLP |
| AllenNLP | Apache 2.0 NLP research library |
| Pattern | Web mining module |
| textacy | Python library for performing NLP tasks |
| TextBlob | Python (2 and 3) library for processing textual data |
| Snips NLU | Natural Language Understanding Python library |
| nlpnet | Natural Language Processing with neural networks |
| GluonNLP | Deep Learning for NLP |
| PyNLPI | Various modules useful for common, and less common, NLP tasks |
| polyglot | Multilingual text (NLP) processing toolkit |
| NLP Architect | Deep Learning NLP/NLU library |
| PyTorch-NLP | Neural network layers, text processing modules and datasets |
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