Package reader

source code

NLTK corpus readers. The modules in this package provide functions that can be used to read corpus fileids in a variety of formats. These functions can be used to read both the corpus fileids that are distributed in the NLTK corpus package, and corpus fileids that are part of external corpora.

Corpus Reader Functions

Each corpus module defines one or more corpus reader functions, which can be used to read documents from that corpus. These functions take an argument, item, which is used to indicate which document should be read from the corpus:

• If item is one of the unique identifiers listed in the corpus module's items variable, then the corresponding document will be loaded from the NLTK corpus package.
• If item is a fileid, then that file will be read.

Additionally, corpus reader functions can be given lists of item names; in which case, they will return a concatenation of the corresponding documents.

Corpus reader functions are named based on the type of information they return. Some common examples, and their return types, are:

• corpus.words(): list of str
• corpus.sents(): list of (list of str)
• corpus.paras(): list of (list of (list of str))
• corpus.tagged_words(): list of (str,str) tuple
• corpus.tagged_sents(): list of (list of (str,str))
• corpus.tagged_paras(): list of (list of (list of (str,str)))
• corpus.chunked_sents(): list of (Tree w/ (str,str) leaves)
• corpus.parsed_sents(): list of (Tree with str leaves)
• corpus.parsed_paras(): list of (list of (Tree with str leaves))
• corpus.xml(): A single xml ElementTree
• corpus.raw(): unprocessed corpus contents

For example, to read a list of the words in the Brown Corpus, use nltk.corpus.brown.words():

>>> from nltk.corpus import brown
>>> print brown.words()
['The', 'Fulton', 'County', 'Grand', 'Jury', 'said', ...]

[Work in Progress: Corpus Metadata =============== Metadata about the NLTK corpora, and their individual documents, is stored using Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) metadata records. These records can be accessed using nltk.corpus.corpus.olac().]