Natural Language Parsing tools: what is out there and what is not? [closed]

Answer 1

NTLK is an interesting toolkit which allows building NLP-based applications. This can be used for practical applications which require for example POS tagging, or which implement simple classifiers or entity extractors.

I'm unsure of what a "language understander" application would encompass, however, but this sounds like something which may be beyond what can [easily] be based upon NLTK.
Reading the question completely, and its reference to morphophonics, seems to confirm that NLTK would probably not serve the OP's purpose very well; to my knowledge NTLK doesn't offer modules that deal with text at this level. You may want to check this for yourself however, as NLTK is a broad and active project and may have seen recent additions in this area.

Answer 2

I suggest you take a look at the following:

1. the ususal nlp libraries like Open NLP, LingPipe, NLTK, Gate, UIMA. All of these provide parsers and word stemmers (i.e. they don't give you back the root of a word, but its stem). Some also provide lemmatizers.
2. websites which collect NLP tools. These are but a few of them: the wiki of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Language Technology World, the website of the compling dep. at Heidelberg University

I'm not aware of a tool which returns the root of a word, but, as I said, there are stemmers and lemmatizers. For lemmatization, try Tree Tagger or Morpha. Morphophonemic analysis is a term not specific enough to get you what you want.

Once you know more specifically what you need, you could search the archives of the Corpora List or post a question there.

Answer 3

I want to chime in with a link to the MontyLingua python package, which can be found here. I think it uses a different parser than the nltk.

http://www.fslog.com/2008/09/20/montylingua3-gpled-fork-of-montylingua/ you can google a comparison with nltk.

Answer 4

Maluuba has just released an API to their Natural Language Processor. It's available at http://developer.maluuba.com.

There are three libraries written for it by Maluuba:

Python Library: https://github.com/maluuba/napi-python

Ruby Library: https://github.com/maluuba/napi-ruby

Java Library: https://github.com/maluuba/napi-java

For an example of the power of it, take this query as an example of what can be extracted:

>> client.interpret phrase: 'Set up a meeting with Bob tomorrow \
          night at 7 PM to discuss the TPS reports'
=> 
    {:entities=>
      {
        :daterange=>[{:start=>"2012-11-15", :end=>"2012-11-16"}],
        :title=>["meeting to discuss the tps reports"],
        :timerange=>[{:start=>"12:00:00AM", :end=>"12:00:00AM"}],
        :contacts=>[{:name=>"bob"}]
      },
     :action=>:CALENDAR_CREATE_EVENT,
     :category=>:CALENDAR
    }