Open Source Natural Language Processing?

fieldmethods asks: "One area where Open Source and Free Software doesn't seem to have really taken off is Natural Language Processing (using computers to deal with human languages). There are a few projects that are open source, such as Festival (a speech synth system, now ported to Java), NLTK, a general-purpose NLP system in Python, and the Linguana project, a Perl implementation of a semantic network not unlike Wordnet (but better). Generally, though, there doesn't seem to be a lot of Open Source momentum behind the field as a whole. It's a challenging, difficult field that would benefit from collaboration, especially given the potential of replacing static corpora with on-the-fly corpora developed by search engines. Is anybody else interested in this?"

Comments

Re:Doesn't look like it!

[Some Guy]

Actually, I am interested in this. I did some computational linuguistics work while I was doing my BSc/MSc and really enjoyed it.

You should also have mentioned your [?] interesting website fieldmethods.net as a good source for exploring all things NLP [which I thought referred to Neuro-Linguisitc Programming when I first saw it...].

Did you google?

[FeatureBug]

Is there a reason you haven't tried answering your question using Google? You're not chasing karma are you? Last I heard Google is free.

There's a huge amount of open-source NLP resources and software for many languages on the web.

• Thought Treasure - a bilingual database of 25000 concepts including 55000 English and French words and phrases. Compiles under Linux and Windows

• Leeds University NLP Research Group (mail webmaster re broken links to software)

• Japan's ICOT/5th Generation Computer Project archive of free software

• Linguistics Toolset at Vaasa University

Last but not least:

• A well-annotated collection of NLP links including NLP, NLU, Speech*, MLT, Fuzzy*, MLPs, SVMs, etc

Will.

two projects

[Kunta Kinte]

http://freespeech.sourceforge.net/
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/

There are probably others ( search google.com, freshmeat.net, sourceforge.net )

open source NLP (in POESIA)

[basiles]

The POESIA (an opensource internet content filter, partly funded by the European Commission, safer Internet Access Plan IAP2117/27572) project will have some opensourced NLP components (for English, Spanish, Italian...).

See POESIA site for details.

POESIA (Public Opensource Environment for a Safer Internet Access) aims to protect European youth (in educational institutions) against harmful or inappropriate Internet content, and use several techniques (including NLP, Image processing, ...) to achieve this goal.

Check out OpenCyc

[jungd]

One of the best speech understanding systems in existance is OpenCyc - and it is open source!

I've got two links for you

[perkr]

General open source NLP tools:

http://opennlp.sourceforge.net

http://nlpfarm.sourceforge.net

If you're looking for speech software there isn't that much good software as open source, since just about every aspect of modern speech processing is patented.