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<Paper uid="W02-0109">
  <Title>NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit</Title>
  <Section position="10" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
9 Conclusions and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> NLTK provides a simple, extensible, uniform framework for assignments, projects, and class demonstrations. It is well documented, easy to learn, and simple to use. We hope that NLTK will allow computational linguistics classes to include more hands-on experience with using and building NLP components and systems.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> NLTK is unique in its combination of three factors. First, it was deliberately designed as courseware and gives pedagogical goals primary status. Second, its target audience consists of both linguists and computer scientists, and it is accessible and challenging at many levels of prior computational skill. Finally, it is based on an object-oriented scripting language supporting rapid prototyping and literate programming. We plan to continue extending the breadth of materials covered by the toolkit. We are currently working on NLTK modules for Hidden Markov Models, language modeling, and tree adjoining grammars. We also plan to increase the number of algorithms implemented by some existing modules, such as the text classiflcation module.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Finding suitable corpora is a prerequisite for many student assignments and projects. We are therefore putting together a collection of corpora containing data appropriate for every module deflned by the toolkit.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> NLTK is an open source project, and we welcome any contributions. Readers who are interested in contributing to NLTK, or who have suggestions for improvements, are encouraged to contact the authors.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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