Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Natural Language Basics with TextBlob

rwet.decontextualize.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 24 posts

Re: Natural Language Basics with TextBlob

#5

Post by languagehacker »

TextBlob is just an easy-to-use wrapper for a number of more involved libraries, including NLTK and Pattern.

As with most things like it, if you're looking to shift off extremely unsophisticated NLP work to a junior developer, this is a good thing.

If you're an engineer focused in the NLP space, using this API would be like tying your hand behind your back. It introduces its own performance problems, and obscures a number of configurations that the APIs of the libraries it wraps expose. I also find its attitude towards object-orientation tends to obscure performance bottlenecks by hiding how much just-in-time computation occurs for a given string.

Also, I hate to admit this, but the Java/Scala NLP stack is beating out most Python NLP libraries these days. NLTK _just_ got Stanford CoreNLP's best-in-class dependency parser. It's been available in Java for years.

Re: Natural Language Basics with TextBlob

#6

Post by syllogism »

languagehacker wrote: post #5

TextBlob is just an easy-to-use wrapper for a number of more involved libraries, including NLTK and Pattern. As with most things like it, if you're looking to shift off extremely unsophisticated NLP work to a junior developer, this is a good thing. If you're an engineer focused in the NLP space, using this API would be like tying your hand behind your back. It introduces its own performance problems, and obscures a n…

If you're doing NLP in Python, there's no reason to use CoreNLP's parser from the NLTK wrapper. Communicating with the Java process over the file system or a socket introduces a tonne of unnecessary complications, slow-downs, invites encoding problems, etc.

spaCy's native Cython dependency parser is both faster and more accurate than CoreNLP.

The NP chunks example from the post:

    >>> from spacy.en import English
    >>> nlp = English()
    >>> doc = nlp(u'ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible.')
    >>> for np in doc.noun_chunks:
    ...   print(np.text)
    ... 
    ITP
    a two-year graduate program
    the Tisch School
    the Arts
    the best way
    us
    a Center

Re: Natural Language Basics with TextBlob

#7

Post by amirouche »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #3

I have't used TextBlob but I found this interesting regardless (I'm very interested in NLP). Thanks for the read! Slightly off topic but I don't see very many NLP libraries for C++ as I do Python; are there any notable ones?

There is http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/ and https://code.google.com/p/mate-tools/. A lot of tools are written in Java.

Re: Natural Language Basics with TextBlob

#8

Post by imh »

I think NLP is really cool, but it seems to be moving so quickly. If I wanted to get a decent overview, are there some review papers or textbooks with good coverage that aren't too out of date?

Re: Natural Language Basics with TextBlob

#9

Post by BinaryIdiot »

amirouche wrote: post #7
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #3

I have't used TextBlob but I found this interesting regardless (I'm very interested in NLP). Thanks for the read! Slightly off topic but I don't see very many NLP libraries for C++ as I do Python; are there any notable ones?

There is http://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/ and https://code.google.com/p/mate-tools/ . A lot of tools are written in Java.

Cool, thanks! I have more reading to do :)
Post reply on HN