Natural Language Processing with Python

Further Reading

Extra materials for this chapter are posted at http://www.nltk.org/, including links to freely available resources on the Web.

The primary sources of linguistic corpora are the Linguistic Data Consortium and the European Language Resources Agency, both with extensive online catalogs. More details concerning the major corpora mentioned in the chapter are available: American National Corpus (Reppen, Ide & Suderman, 2005), British National Corpus (BNC, 1999), Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG, 1999), Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) (MacWhinney, 1995), and TIMIT (Garofolo et al., 1986).

Two special interest groups of the Association for Computational Linguistics that organize regular workshops with published proceedings are SIGWAC, which promotes the use of the Web as a corpus and has sponsored the CLEANEVAL task for removing HTML markup, and SIGANN, which is encouraging efforts toward interoperability of linguistic annotations. An extended discussion of web crawling is provided by (Croft, Metzler & Strohman, 2009).

Full details of the Toolbox data format are provided with the distribution (Buseman, Buseman & Early, 1996), and with the latest distribution freely available from http://www.sil.org/computing/toolbox/. For guidelines on the process of constructing a Toolbox lexicon, see http://www.sil.org/computing/ddp/. More examples of our efforts with the Toolbox are documented in (Bird, 1999) and (Robinson, Aumann & Bird, 2007). Dozens of other tools for linguistic ...