babelize_shell() not working in NLTK package

Question

I was going through NLP using python and I found the following error:

babelize_shell()
NLTK Babelizer: type 'help' for a list of commands.
Babel> how long before the next flight to Alice Springs?
Babel> german
Babel> run
0> how long before the next flight to Alice Springs?
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/misc/babelfish.py", line 175, in babelize_shell
    for count, new_phrase in enumerate(babelize(phrase, 'english', language)):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/misc/babelfish.py", line 126, in babelize
    phrase = translate(phrase, next, flip[next])
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nltk/misc/babelfish.py", line 106, in translate
    if not match: raise BabelfishChangedError("Can't recognize translated string.")
nltk.misc.babelfish.BabelfishChangedError: Can't recognize translated string.

I have imported nltk.book as mentioned:

from nltk.book import*

*** Introductory Examples for the NLTK Book ***

Loading text1, ..., text9 and sent1, ..., sent9

Type the name of the text or sentence to view it.

Type: 'texts()' or 'sents()' to list the materials.

text1: Moby Dick by Herman Melville 1851

text2: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen 1811

text3: The Book of Genesis

text4: Inaugural Address Corpus

text5: Chat Corpus

text6: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

text7: Wall Street Journal

text8: Personals Corpus

text9: The Man Who Was Thursday by G . K . Chesterton 1908

Can someone help me. I am new to Python and not getting what the error is exactly.

Answer 1

The issue isn't with your code. The problem is that the babelfish translation service is no longer in operation so the example code no longer works.

More details at https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/265