Quotes
What people have said about NLTK
((NLTK) (is (fun))) http://www.m3gan.com/2009/07/nltk-is-fun/ ... the quite remarkable Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), a wonderful tool for teaching, and working in, computational linguistics using Python. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-cpnltk.html
Natural Language Toolkit (nltk) is an amazing library to play with natural language. http://www.biais.org/blog/index.php/2007/01/31/25-spelling-correction-using-the-python-natural-language-toolkit-nltk
... a wonderful lightweight framework that provides a wealth of NLP tools. http://harnly.net/2007/blog/geek/lang/ruby/nltks-ing-words-variations/
NLTK is an excellent package for teaching ... I used it for my NLP course, and students got a kick out of it. Written in Python, which makes it a treat to use and extend. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PANLocalization/message/313
Using Python and NLTK for assignments removed any programming barriers and enabled me to focus on the course concepts. ... The assignments were absolutely fantastic and supplemented the material presented in class. http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-0209.pdf
A good place to start for those learning about NLP for the first time, this has been used in many academic situations. It is extremely well documented, with tutorials which not only explain the tool, but also give an overview of the subject (eg document clustering). I was able to go from downloading it for the first time, to creating and training a 2004 Task 1A system (bigram gene name tagger) in about and hour. http://compbio.uchsc.edu/corpora/bcresources.html
NLTK is the hotness, particularly if you want to do your language-y things in Python. It's intended for educational use, but it has what you need, and it lets you compare different algorithms for tokenizing, tagging, and parsing chunks of text, very pluggably. http://penguinparens.blogspot.com/2006/10/nltk-and-generating-horoscopes.html
Students with no previous programming experience will be able to spend more of their time thinking about the logical steps involved in getting the computer to process language data, and less time mastering and using the arcana involved in getting the computer to do anything at all. http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-3165.html
With this kind of software available for download, there will be many more unsuspecting Python users. The really nice thing, of course, is that the users aren't interested in using a particular language, they are interested in solving problems in a specific domain. The fact that Python lets them do this is a testament to its usefulness. http://holdenweb.blogspot.com/2007/05/natural-language-toolkit.html
Even more demanding language analysis tasks require techniques developed in artificial intelligence research, such as semantic analysis and machine learning. For instance, the Natural Language Toolkit, or NLTK, is an open source suite of Python libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing. It applies linguistic techniques to textual data, and it can be used in the development of natural language recognition software and systems. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009250/ (Programming Python, Mark Lutz)