NLP Libraries

Monday, March 6th 2023

What are good libraries for building production level NLP applications and which programming languages do they use?

There are several libraries and frameworks available for building production-level NLP (natural language processing) applications. Here are some popular ones along with the programming languages they use:

  1. Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK): NLTK is a popular NLP library for Python. It provides support for tasks such as tokenization, stemming, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing.

  2. Stanford CoreNLP: Stanford CoreNLP is a suite of NLP tools written in Java. It provides support for tasks such as named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and coreference resolution.

  3. Apache OpenNLP: Apache OpenNLP is an NLP library for Java. It provides support for tasks such as tokenization, sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition.

  4. spaCy: spaCy is a Python-based NLP library that provides support for tasks such as tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, and dependency parsing. It is known for its speed and efficiency.

  5. Gensim: Gensim is a Python library that provides support for tasks such as topic modeling and document similarity analysis.

  6. Hugging Face Transformers: Hugging Face Transformers is a Python-based library that provides support for various NLP tasks, including natural language understanding and generation, text classification, and question-answering.

These libraries and frameworks are widely used in industry and research for building production-level NLP applications. The choice of library and programming language will depend on the specific requirements and goals of the project.


Stanford NLP versus Apache Open NLP

Stanford NLP and Apache OpenNLP are both widely used natural language processing (NLP) libraries, but there are some differences between them in terms of features, performance, and ease of use.

Advantages of Stanford NLP:

  • Stanford NLP provides a wider range of features than Apache OpenNLP, including named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and coreference resolution.
  • Stanford NLP is known for its high accuracy and has been widely used in research and industry.
  • Stanford NLP is relatively easy to use and provides a simple API for accessing its features.

Disadvantages of Stanford NLP:

  • Stanford NLP is written in Java, which can make it less convenient for Python programmers.
  • Stanford NLP can be slow to run on large datasets, which can be a disadvantage for some applications.

Advantages of Apache OpenNLP:

  • Apache OpenNLP is written in Java and provides a simple API for accessing its features.
  • Apache OpenNLP is known for its speed and efficiency and can process large datasets quickly.
  • Apache OpenNLP has a modular design, which allows users to choose only the components they need.

Disadvantages of Apache OpenNLP:

  • Apache OpenNLP provides a narrower range of features than Stanford NLP.
  • The accuracy of Apache OpenNLP is generally lower than Stanford NLP, especially for more complex NLP tasks such as coreference resolution.

In summary, both Stanford NLP and Apache OpenNLP are powerful NLP libraries with their own strengths and weaknesses. The choice of library will depend on the specific requirements and goals of the project. If a wider range of features and high accuracy are important, Stanford NLP may be a better choice. If speed and efficiency are more important, Apache OpenNLP may be a better choice.