Natural language processing (NLP) is a field situated at the convergence of data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that – when reduced to the basics is all about teaching machines how to comprehend human dialects and extract significance from text processing. This explains why Artificial Intelligence is essential for NLP projects.
You might be wondering – what’s the reason why many companies care about NLP? Basically, because these advances can give them an expansive reach, important bits of knowledge, and arrangements that address language-related issues purchasers may encounter while cooperating with an item.
So, in this article, we will cover the top 8 Python libraries for NLP and tools that could be useful for building real-world projects. Read on!
This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon.
NLTK is the main library for building Python projects to work with human language data. It gives simple to-utilize interfaces to more than 50 corpora and lexical assets like WordNet, alongside a set-up of text preprocessing libraries for tagging, parsing, classification, stemming, tokenization, and semantic reasoning wrappers for NLP libraries and an active conversation discussion. NLTK is accessible for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. The best part is that NLTK is a free, open-source, local area-driven venture. It has some disadvantages as well. It is slow and difficult to match the demands of production usage. The learning curve is somehow steep. Some of the features provided by NLTK are:
For more information, check the official documentation: Link
Gensim is one of the best Python libraries for NLP tasks. It provides a special feature to identify semantic similarity between two documents using vector space modeling and the topic modeling toolkit. All algorithms in GenSim are memory-independent concerning corpus size, which means we can process input larger than RAM. It provides a set of algorithms that are very useful in natural language tasks such as the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process(HDP), Random Projections(RP), Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA), Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA/SVD/LSI) or word2vec deep learning. The most advanced feature of GenSim is its processing speed and fantastic memory usage optimization. The main uses of GenSim include Data Analysis, Text generation applications (chatbots), and Semantic search applications. GenSim highly depends on SciPy and NumPy for scientific computing.
For more information, check the official documentation: Link.
SpaCy is one of the best open-source Python libraries for NLP. It is mainly designed for production usage- to build real-world projects and helps handle a large number of text data. Renowned for its rapidity and precision, SpaCy is a favored option for handling extensive datasets. This toolkit is written in Python in Cython, which is why it is much faster and more efficient to handle a large amount of text data. Some of the features of SpaCy are shown below:
For more information, check the official documentation: Link.
Stanford CoreNLP contains a grouping of human language innovation instruments. It means to make the use of semantic analysis tools to a piece of text simple and proficient. With CoreNLP, you can extract a wide range of text properties (like part-of-speech tagging,named-entity recognition, and so forth) in a couple of lines of code.
Since CoreNLP is written in Java, it requests that you introduce Java on your device. Notwithstanding, it offers programming interfaces for well-known programming languages, including Python. The tool consolidates various Stanford’s NLP tools, such as sentiment analysis, part-of-speech (POS) tagger, bootstrapped pattern learning, parser, named entity recognizer (NER), and coreference resolution system. Besides, CoreNLP upholds four dialects separate from English: Arabic, Chinese, German, French, and Spanish.
For more information, check the official documentation: Link.
TextBlob is one of the famous Python libraries for NLP (Python 2 and Python 3) powered by NLTK. Constructed atop NLTK, it furnishes a streamlined API for typical Natural Language Processing (NLP) functions. It is the fastest NLP tool among all the libraries. It is beginners friendly. It is a must-learning tool for data scientist enthusiasts who are starting their journey with Python and NLP. It provides an easy interface to help beginners and has all the basic NLP functionalities, such as sentiment analysis, phrase extraction, parsing, and many more. Some of the features of TextBlob are shown below:
For more information, check the official documentation: Link.
It is one of the most advanced Natural Language Processing Tools out there now. This is built on PyTorch tools and libraries. It is ideal for business and research applications. It has developed into an undeniable tool for various text-processing investigations. AllenNLP utilizes the SpaCy open-source library for data preprocessing while at the same time dealing with the lay cycles all alone. The fundamental component of AllenNLP is that it is easy to utilize. Unlike other NLP tools with numerous modules, AllenNLP simplifies the Natural Language Process. So you never feel lost in the yield results. It is an astounding tool for beginners. The most energizing model of AllenNLP is Event2Mind. With this tool, you can investigate client purpose and response, which are fundamental for item or service advancement. AllenNLP is reasonable for both straightforward and complex tasks.
For more information, check the official documentation: Link.
This marginally lesser-realized library, coupled with its expansive scope of analysis and excellent language coverage, is one of my top picks. Thanks to NumPy, it also performs super fast. Utilizing multilingual features akin to spaCy, it’s efficient and clear, making it an excellent choice for projects involving languages spaCy doesn’t support, especially when working with Python NLP libraries.
Following are the features of Polyglot:
For more information, check official documentation: Link.
It is one of the greater Python libraries for NLP and is most used among data scientists for NLP tasks. It provides a large number of algorithms to build machine learning models. It has excellent documentation that helps data scientists and makes learning easier. The main advantage of sci-kit learn is it has great intuitive class methods. It offers many functions for bag-of-words to convert text into numerical vectors. It has some disadvantages as well. It doesn’t provide you with neural networks for text preprocessing. It is better to use other NLP libraries if you want to carry out more complex preprocessing, such as POS tagging for text corpora.
For more information, check the official documentation: Link
This article has provided an overview of the top 8 Natural Language Processing libraries in Python for machine learning in 2024. Whether you are a seasoned practitioner or a beginner in the field, these libraries offer a range of tools and functionalities to enhance your NLP projects. Additionally, it’s crucial to emphasize the importance of effective visualization techniques to gain insights from your data and the utilization of word vectors for tasks like semantic similarity and language understanding. We hope the information presented here proves valuable to your projects. Thank you for reading, and best of luck with your endeavors in the dynamic world of Natural Language Processing and machine learning!
Check the NLP tutorial here: NLP Tutorials Part -I from Basics to Advance.
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Ans. Choosing the best NLP library depends on your specific needs. Popular ones include NLTK, SpaCy, and Hugging Face Transformers. NLTK is versatile for education, SpaCy excels in speed and simplicity, while Hugging Face Transformers offers pre-trained models for various tasks. Evaluate based on your project requirements.
Ans. The four types of Natural Language Processing (NLP) are:
A. Syntax-Based NLP: Analyzes sentence structure.
B. Semantics-Based NLP: Focuses on meaning and context.
C. Statistical NLP: Utilizes statistical models for language patterns.
D. Hybrid NLP: Integrates multiple approaches for comprehensive language understanding.
Ans. Yes, learning Python is highly worthwhile. It’s versatile and widely used in various domains like web development, data science, and artificial intelligence. Python’s readability and extensive libraries simplify coding. Its community support fosters growth, making it an excellent choice for beginners and professionals alike, enhancing career opportunities and problem-solving skills.
Ans. JohnSnowLab’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) excels due to its advanced models, extensive pre-trained language representations, and scalable infrastructure. It offers state-of-the-art text analysis, information extraction, and sentiment analysis solutions. The platform’s versatility, accuracy, and user-friendly interfaces make it a preferred choice for businesses and researchers seeking robust NLP solutions.
Ans. Yes, Natural Language Processing (NLP) libraries and blockchains can be integrated to enhance data security, transparency, and trust in applications. Storing and processing NLP-related data on a blockchain ensures immutability, decentralized access, and verifiable provenance, fostering a more robust and reliable system.
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I love your X libraries articles, there is always something interesting to discover I did not know about. In this case Polyglot. Thank you and keep them coming :-)
Hey Analytics Vidya ! I absolutely interact your content its very helpful and valuable.I love it.Thank you for the information.
I'm excited to see more Python libraries for NLP in 2021!
Great list! I'm glad to see spaCy making waves in the NLP space. Their performance on tokenization and entity recognition is truly impressive. Can't wait to see what other innovations they come up with in the future.
Just started exploring NLP and this post is really helpful! The introduction to spaCy was enlightening, I didn't know it had such capabilities. I'm currently using NLTK but considering trying out Stanford CoreNLP for my project now. Thanks for sharing your insights!