Author: Jason Baldridge ([email protected])
Chalk is a library for natural language processing (NLP). It is based on the OpenNLP library, but will be transitioning to more use of Scala (rather than Java) as new capabilities are added.
The name Chalk comes from the name given to one of Jason's son's stuffed elephants. "Chalk" obviously has a great connection to writing (and thus text processing). Of course, it also follows the what-your-kid-called-his-elephant naming convention precedent established with Hadoop. :)
The latest stable release is 1.1.2. What's new for this version?
- Updated Chalk to reflect reorganization in Nak v1.1.1.
- Rounded out the MASC corpus processing and added tool for training and evaluating sentence detection, tokenization, and NER on the corpus.
- Added Scala version of the PorterStemmer.
See the CHANGELOG for changes in previous versions.
In SBT:
libraryDependencies += "org.scalanlp" % "chalk" % "1.1.2"
In Maven:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.scalanlp</groupId>
<artifactId>chalk</artifactId>
<version>1.1.2</version>
</dependency>
- Version 1.6 of the Java 2 SDK (https://java.sun.com)
The easiest thing to do is to set the environment variables JAVA_HOME
and CHALK_DIR to the relevant locations on your system. Set JAVA_HOME
to match the top level directory containing the Java installation you
want to use.
Next, add the directory CHALK_DIR/bin to your path. For example, you
can set the path in your .bashrc file as follows:
export PATH=$PATH:$CHALK_DIR/bin
Once you have taken care of these three things, you should be able to build and use Chalk.
Chalk uses SBT (Simple Build Tool) with a standard directory
structure. To build Chalk, type (in the CHALK_DIR directory):
$ ./build update compile
This will compile the source files and put them in
./target/classes. If this is your first time running it, you will see
messages about Scala being downloaded -- this is fine and
expected. Once that is over, the Chalk code will be compiled.
To try out other build targets, do:
$ ./build
This will drop you into the SBT interface. To see the actions that are possible, hit the TAB key. (In general, you can do auto-completion on any command prefix in SBT, hurrah!)
To make sure all the tests pass, do:
$ ./build test
Documentation for SBT is at https://www.scala-sbt.org/
Note: if you have SBT already installed on your system, you can
also just call it directly with "sbt" in CHALK_DIR.
Assuming you have completed all of the above steps, including running the "compile" action in SBT, you should now be able to try out some examples. Check out the Chalk tutorials for examples.
Email Jason Baldridge: [email protected]
Or, create an issue: https://github.com/scalanlp/chalk/issues