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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?"

5 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. It depends on what you call NLP by Boglin · · Score: 4, Funny

    If machines that attempt the Turing Test count as NLP, then NLP is a solved problem. You just need a random number generator to choose from a list of prechosen responses (face it, there's nothing less believable than talking to someone who actually listens to you.) Therefore, I submit Virtual Boglin:

    #include

    void main() {
    int i = 1;

    printf("Hello\n");
    while(i) {
    scanf();
    switch(i){
    case 1: printf("Microsoft Sucks! Use Linux!\n");break;
    case 2: printf("I need to boot back over to the Windows side to play System Shock 2.\n");break;
    case 3: printf("Sony is an evil monster who won't be content until we have lost all our rights.\n");break;
    case 4: printf("Have I shown you my Clie? Look, it can play the Spiderman Trailer!\n");
    }
    i=rand()%5;
    }
    printf("Leave me alone; I'm about to get a new high score.\n");
    }

  2. Did you google? by FeatureBug · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    Last but not least:

    Will.

  3. two projects by Kunta+Kinte · · Score: 3, Informative
    http://freespeech.sourceforge.net/
    http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/

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

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  4. Check out OpenCyc by jungd · · Score: 3, Informative

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

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  5. I've got two links for you by perkr · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.