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You're reading from  Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook

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Published inAug 2014
Reading LevelBeginner
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ISBN-139781782167853
Edition1st Edition
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Jacob Perkins
Jacob Perkins
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Jacob Perkins

Jacob Perkins is the cofounder and CTO of Weotta, a local search company. Weotta uses NLP and machine learning to create powerful and easy-to-use natural language search for what to do and where to go. He is the author of Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook, Packt Publishing, and has contributed a chapter to the Bad Data Handbook, O'Reilly Media. He writes about NLTK, Python, and other technology topics at http://streamhacker.com. To demonstrate the capabilities of NLTK and natural language processing, he developed http://text-processing.com, which provides simple demos and NLP APIs for commercial use. He has contributed to various open source projects, including NLTK, and created NLTK-Trainer to simplify the process of training NLTK models. For more information, visit https://github.com/japerk/nltk-trainer.
Read more about Jacob Perkins

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Setting up a custom corpus


A corpus is a collection of text documents, and corpora is the plural of corpus. This comes from the Latin word for body; in this case, a body of text. So a custom corpus is really just a bunch of text files in a directory, often alongside many other directories of text files.

Getting ready

You should already have the NLTK data package installed, following the instructions at http://www.nltk.org/data. We'll assume that the data is installed to C:\nltk_data on Windows, and /usr/share/nltk_data on Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X.

How to do it...

NLTK defines a list of data directories, or paths, in nltk.data.path. Our custom corpora must be within one of these paths so it can be found by NLTK. In order to avoid conflict with the official data package, we'll create a custom nltk_data directory in our home directory. The following is some Python code to create this directory and verify that it is in the list of known paths specified by nltk.data.path:

>>> import os,...
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Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook
Published in: Aug 2014Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781782167853

Author (1)

author image
Jacob Perkins

Jacob Perkins is the cofounder and CTO of Weotta, a local search company. Weotta uses NLP and machine learning to create powerful and easy-to-use natural language search for what to do and where to go. He is the author of Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook, Packt Publishing, and has contributed a chapter to the Bad Data Handbook, O'Reilly Media. He writes about NLTK, Python, and other technology topics at http://streamhacker.com. To demonstrate the capabilities of NLTK and natural language processing, he developed http://text-processing.com, which provides simple demos and NLP APIs for commercial use. He has contributed to various open source projects, including NLTK, and created NLTK-Trainer to simplify the process of training NLTK models. For more information, visit https://github.com/japerk/nltk-trainer.
Read more about Jacob Perkins