Home - NLP-Suite/NLP-Suite GitHub Wiki
NLP Suite
WE ARE WORKING ON A NEW WEB-BASED APPROACH TO THE INSTALLATION AND RUNNING OF THE NLP SUITE BASED ON DOCKER. CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW.
Click here to open the download page and install the current release of the freeware, open source NLP Suite package.
Click here to view Release history, a complete list of bug fixes and new algorithms for current and past NLP Suite releases.
What is the NLP Suite
In an age of BIG DATA, the purpose of the freeware, open-source NLP Suite is rather to provide humanists and social scientists a wide range of computational tools for the analysis and visualization of smaller datasets, the more typical datasets humanists and social scientists use (e.g., the works of one Nobel Prize winner, a handful of in-depth interviews, a few thousand newspaper articles).
Furthermore, the NLP Suite is designed for non-specialists, for scholars with no knowledge or little knowledge of Natural Language Processing. As Rafael Piloto puts it, our target user is a fourth grader.
The NLP Suite runs on either Windows or Mac Operating Systems. Many of the core algorithms of the current release of the NLP Suite work for the English Language only (e.g., Stanford CoreNLP, WordNet). Check out supported OS & language.
The NLP Suite is a freeware, open source package, nearly all written in Python, that for specialized tasks relies on a wide range of freeware Python packages and external software (from Stanford CoreNLP to Stanza, Gephi, Google Earth Pro, Google Maps, MALLET, SENNA, WordNet).
A brief history of the NLP Suite
The idea of the NLP Suite came out of Franzosi's life-long work on computer-assisted textual analysis using PC-ACE (Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Events) and of the recent teaching of Big/Small Data & Visualization (Emory Soc/Ling/QTM 446W) in the Spring semester of 2016. To the handful of NLP Java files in PC-ACE written by Alberto Purpura in the Fall 2016, we started adding a few Python scripts written by students (e.g., a Python wrapper of Stanford CoreNLP). These Python scripts were run from command line independently of PC-ACE, could only process one or a handful of files, were not user friendly and were very buggy and slow.
In the Spring semester of 2019, with Jack Hester as TA, we worked hard to improve the Python algorithms and to introduce Graphical User Interface (GUI) in Tkinter for the major scripts.
In the summer of 2019, while a visiting professor at the University of Urbino, Italy, Franzosi decided to learn Python (with the help of Marco Cappellacci) to keep up with what student collaborators were doing. Franzosi made it his obsession to continuously improve the user interface, generalize the scripts, and structure the package.
In the Fall semester 2019, with Josh Karol as TA, we abandoned PC-ACE altogether and focused on improving the growing number of Python scripts and the GUIs.
As we were exchanging Python files over email, collaborators Yi Wang and Brett Landau started urging Franzosi to setup the package in GitHub. Swamped with development work, Franzosi resisted having to learn new things until, in the Spring 2021, Rafael Piloto took the time to setup the NLP Suite GitHub page and here we are. And yes, learning the ins and outs of GitHub was not easy; not to mention writing all the documents for first-time users. Wei Dai wrote the scripts to install the NLP Suite with ongoing improvements. Franzosi continued to work on the user interface, developing the online ?HELP, Read me, videos, reminders, TIPS and, with hundreds of functions and scripts, the structure of the NLP Suite. At the same time, he has continued to work with his team on extending the range of NLP tools available in the NLP Suite.
In the Spring semester 2024, Rafael Piloto designed the new web-based approach to the NLP-Suite and new installation based on Docker and managed the team that worked on the project: Aiden Amaya, Calla Gong, Isaac (William) Light, and Sherry Rui.