Anyone hear when NLTK 3.0 will be out?

Question

The website, http://www.nltk.org, says mid 2011 in a very vague manner. I would like to start using NLTK however I have done a fair amount of work with Python 3.x and I don't want to have to go backwards in Python version just to use it. Just doing an effort analysis, if the wait is long enough I might bite the bullet and revert my Python.

Answer 1

There's a Python 3 branch:

https://github.com/nltk/nltk/tree/nltk-py3k

It's a transformation of the trunk and gets updated every so often to keep up with changes. You can check it out directly from git (instead of using the NLTK installation) and give it a shot.

git clone git://github.com/nltk/nltk.git nltk --branch nltk-py3k

I haven't used it personally, but I assume it works.

Answer 2

There is a "2and3" branch in the main nltk repo - see https://github.com/nltk/nltk/tree/2and3

It appears to be getting updated regularly, although I haven't tried it myself.

Answer 3

Here's the alpha release: https://github.com/nltk/nltk3-alpha

Alternative NLP: TextBlob is fully Python 3. https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob

Tutorial: http://www.stevenloria.com/how-to-build-a-text-classification-system-with-python-and-textblob/

Answer 4

For those who got here wondering when will nltk support python3:

Good news, the NLTK 3.0 series (currently on alpha and in development since Jan 2013) now support Python 2.6, 2.7 and Python 3 (http://www.nltk.org/nltk3-alpha/), We'll probably see a stable release soon :)

And the book is also being updated for python3, available at: http://www.nltk.org/book3/