From NLTK

Design of NLTK

Self-paced learning

• NLTK is accessible to a broad range of students
• it covers knowledge and skills for many areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• NLTK permits students to learn at their own pace and to test their knowledge as they go - e.g. see the Introduction to Programming
• all modules are thoroughly documented

Learning Python

• Python is easy to learn and has good string-handling functionality
• Python is an interpreted language, which facilitates interactive exploration
• Python is object-oriented, which permits data and methods to be re-used easily
• Python has an extensive library including support for graphical and numerical processing
• the NLTK Book teaches Python programming with the aid of many linguistic examples

Accessing data

• NLTK comes with many annotated linguistic corpora
• corpora can be accessed efficiently using corpus readers
• corpus readers provide a simple and consistent interface to corpora in dozens of formats

Reading the code

• we've been careful to ensure that NLTK code is as readable as possible, so students can learn NLP algorithms by reading the code; here is the n-gram tagger implementation
• simplicity and clarity are given higher priority than efficiency and clever programming tricks
• naming conventions are consistent and transparent

What NLTK Provides

Easy-to-install distributions

• Simply refer students to the installation instructions
• Download the ISO image and give NLTK CDs to students

Tutorials and exercises

• The NLTK Book is written in an informal tutorial style
• It includes hundreds of exercises, graded for difficulty
• It includes many suggestions for further reading

Interactive demonstrations

• NLTK provides graphical tools that can be used to demonstrate NLP concepts and algorithms
• See the Getting Started page for instructions

Slides

• Presentation slides are in preparation; some are already available here (latex beamer format). Other slides may be available via the web pages of other courses using NLTK.

Courses

Courses

Many courses use NLTK; here is a list of the courses we are aware of.