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⇱ How To Work with Language Data in Python 3 using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) | DigitalOcean


How To Work with Language Data in Python 3 using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)

Published on January 4, 2017
👁 How To Work with Language Data in Python 3 using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)

Introduction

Text-based communication has become one of the most common forms of expression. We email, text message, tweet, and update our statuses on a daily basis. As a result, unstructured text data has become extremely common, and analyzing large quantities of text data is now a key way to understand what people are thinking.

Tweets on Twitter help us find trending news topics in the world. Reviews on Amazon help users purchase the best-rated products. These examples of organizing and structuring knowledge represent Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks.

NLP is a field of computer science that focuses on the interaction between computers and humans. NLP techniques are used to analyze text, providing a way for computers to understand human language. A few examples of NLP applications include automatic summarization, topic segmentation, and sentiment analysis.

This tutorial will provide an introduction to using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK): an NLP tool for Python.

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About the author(s)

Community and Developer Education expert. Former Senior Manager, Community at DigitalOcean. Focused on topics including Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Python, Django, and more.

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Great one! Hope to see more of NLP articles. Thanks!

Hi All -

I hope someone is able to help. I have completed python + local programming environment and am running into an issue with permisison.

I’m getting the following error after entering pip install nltk

creating /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/nltk error: could not create ‘/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/nltk’: Permission denied

Hey, thanks for the tutorial it was very informative.

Thanks for sharing such a nice information. With the help of NLP you can easily manage data science application. If you want to learn this application you can go for data analytics training course.

python -m nltk.downloader twitter_samples

this command did not run successfully, how can I run this successfully? Submitting the output from the terminal

[Output]: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/runpy.py:126: RuntimeWarning: ‘nltk.downloader’ found in sys.modules after import of package ‘nltk’, but prior to execution of ‘nltk.downloader’; this may result in unpredictable behaviour warn(RuntimeWarning(msg)) [nltk_data] Error loading twitter_samples: <urlopen error [SSL: [nltk_data] CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: [nltk_data] unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1108)> Error installing package. Retry? [n/y/e] y Traceback (most recent call last): File “/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/runpy.py”, line 193, in _run_module_as_main return _run_code(code, main_globals, None, File “/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.8/lib/python3.8/runpy.py”, line 86, in _run_code exec(code, run_globals) File “/Users/zeus/New/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/nltk/downloader.py”, line 2544, in <module> rv = downloader.download( File “/Users/zeus/New/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/nltk/downloader.py”, line 801, in download msg.package.id, AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘id’

Great tutorial but… I wasn’t able to complete. My code runs into an error on this line:

tweets_tagged = pos_tag_sents(tweets_tokens)

NotImplementedError: Currently, NLTK pos_tag only supports English and Russian (i.e. lang=‘eng’ or lang=‘rus’)

Not sure why I am getting this when the code runs fine on the site… But I managed to follow the logic of the rest due to the great layout of the tutorial. So thank you.

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