NLTK Installation with Python easy_install

Few weeks ago I wrote the NLTK on Ubuntu Quick Start Guide. Now with the release of NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) 2.0b5 today the NLTK installation has been greatly simplified thanks to the nltk python egg (See Changelog).

To get started with NLTK install, you first need the python-setuptools package.

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  python-setuptools
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 195kB of archives.
After this operation, 909kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main python-setuptools 0.6c9-0ubuntu4 [195kB]
Fetched 195kB in 9s (20.2kB/s)                                                 
Selecting previously deselected package python-setuptools.
(Reading database ... 106971 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking python-setuptools (from .../python-setuptools_0.6c9-0ubuntu4_all.deb) ...
Setting up python-setuptools (0.6c9-0ubuntu4) ...



 Now lets install the NLTK with easy_install program.


$ sudo easy_install http://nltk.googlecode.com/files/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
 
Downloading http://nltk.googlecode.com/files/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
Processing nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
creating /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
Extracting nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg to /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages
Adding nltk 2.0b5 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg
Processing dependencies for nltk==2.0b5
Searching for PyYAML==3.08
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/PyYAML/
Reading http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAML
Best match: PyYAML 3.08
Downloading http://pyyaml.org/download/pyyaml/PyYAML-3.08.zip
Processing PyYAML-3.08.zip
Running PyYAML-3.08/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-T7Y0La/PyYAML-3.08/egg-dist-tmp-vRjvDM
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:2:18: error: yaml.h: No such file or directory
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c: In function ‘main’:
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: ‘yaml_parser_t’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: for each function it appears in.)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:5: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘parser’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:6: error: ‘yaml_emitter_t’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:6: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘emitter’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_parser_initialize’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:8: error: ‘parser’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:9: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_parser_delete’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_emitter_initialize’
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:11: error: ‘emitter’ undeclared (first use in this function)
build/temp.linux-i686-2.6/check_libyaml.c:12: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘yaml_emitter_delete’

libyaml is not found or a compiler error: forcing --without-libyaml
(if libyaml is installed correctly, you may need to
 specify the option --include-dirs or uncomment and
 modify the parameter include_dirs in setup.cfg)
zip_safe flag not set; analyzing archive contents...
Adding PyYAML 3.08 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/PyYAML-3.08-py2.6-linux-i686.egg
Finished processing dependencies for nltk==2.0b5



 Now you done, import the NLTK and start downloading the NTLK data.


$ python
Python 2.6.2+ (release26-maint, Jun 19 2009, 15:14:35) 
[GCC 4.4.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download()
NLTK Downloader
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    d) Download      l) List      c) Config      h) Help      q) Quit
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Downloader> l

Packages:
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/nltk-2.0b5-py2.6.egg/nltk/__init__.py:588: DeprecationWarning: object.__new__() takes no parameters
  [ ] maxent_ne_chunker... ACE Named Entity Chunker (Maximum entropy)
  [ ] abc................. Australian Broadcasting Commission 2006
  [ ] brown............... Brown Corpus
  [ ] alpino.............. Alpino Dutch Treebank
  [ ] cess_cat............ CESS-CAT Treebank
  [ ] brown_tei........... Brown Corpus (TEI XML Version)
  [ ] cmudict............. The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary (0.6)
  [ ] biocreative_ppi..... BioCreAtIvE (Critical Assessment of Information
                           Extraction Systems in Biology)
  [ ] cess_esp............ CESS-ESP Treebank
  [ ] chat80.............. Chat-80 Data Files
  [ ] city_database....... City Database
  [ ] conll2002........... CONLL 2002 Named Entity Recognition Corpus
  [ ] conll2000........... CONLL 2000 Chunking Corpus
  [ ] conll2007........... Dependency Treebanks from CoNLL 2007 (Catalan
                           and Basque Subset)
  [ ] dependency_treebank. Dependency Parsed Treebank
  [ ] floresta............ Portuguese Treebank
  [ ] genesis............. Genesis Corpus
  [ ] gazetteers.......... Gazeteer Lists
Hit Enter to continue: