Although there are many tools for natural language processing tasks in Estonian, these tools are very loosely interoperable, and it is not easy to build practical applications on top of them. In this paper, we introduce a new Python library for natural language processing in Estonian, which provides unified programming interface for various NLP components. The EstNLTK toolkit provides utilities for basic NLP tasks including tokenization, morphological analysis, lemmatisation and named entity recognition as well as offers more advanced features such as a clause segmentation, temporal expression extraction and normalization, verb chain detection, Estonian Wordnet integration and rule-based information extraction. Accompanied by a detailed API documentation and comprehensive tutorials, EstNLTK is suitable for a wide range of audience. We believe EstNLTK is mature enough to be used for developing NLP-backed systems both in industry and research. EstNLTK is freely available under the GNU GPL version 2+ license, which is standard for academic software.
@InProceedings{ORASMAA16.332,
author = {Siim Orasmaa and Timo Petmanson and Alexander Tkachenko and Sven Laur and Heiki-Jaan Kaalep}, title = {EstNLTK - NLP Toolkit for Estonian}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
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