| Original author(s) | Edward Loper, Steven Bird |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | NLTK - Developers and contributors |
| Initial release | 2001[1] |
| Stable release | 2.0b9 / July 25, 2010 |
| Preview release | 2.0.1 (rc1) / April 11, 2011 |
| Written in | Python |
| Available in | Python |
| Type | natural language processing |
| License | Apache 2.0 |
| Website | nltk.org |
Natural Language Toolkit or, more commonly, NLTK is a suite of libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP) for the Python programming language. NLTK includes graphical demonstrations and sample data. It is accompanied by extensive documentation, including a book that explains the underlying concepts behind the language processing tasks supported by the toolkit.[2]
NLTK is ideally suited to students who are learning NLP or conducting research in NLP or closely related areas, including empirical linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and machine learning.[3] NLTK has been used successfully as a teaching tool, as an individual study tool, and as a platform for prototyping and building research systems. The NLTK Project is led by Steven Bird.