Installation (Development)

Download and install NLTK from http://nltk.org/install.html if you do not already have it.

Move masc.py into your-path-to-nltk/corpus/reader/

In nltk/corpus/__init__.py add this code after the import statements,

masc = LazyCorpusLoader('oanc_masc', MascCorpusReader, r'(?!\.).*\.txt', encoding='utf-8')

In nltk/corpus/reader/__init__.py add this line,

from nltk.corpus.reader.masc import *

and add 'MascCorpusReader' (with single quotes) to the list of Corpus readers in the __all__ = [ statement.

Make sure you have the oanc_masc zip file and/or folder within your nltk_data/corpora directory.

The NLTK data folder is probably in your home folder. Inside of the MASC folder be the written and spoken directories.

You can download MASC 3.0.0 from http://anc.org but you need to rename the directory to oanc_masc and move it to nltk_data/corpora.

Usage

Open a python shell, such as IDLE,

import nltk

To use the MascCorpusReader type:

nltk.corpus.masc

For example, to see the list of files in the MASC directory type

nltk.corpus.masc.fileids()

For more example usage see http://nltk.sourceforge.net/corpus.html