Failed loading english.pickle with nltk.data.load

Question

I had this same problem. Go into a python shell and type:

>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download()

Then an installation window appears. Go to the 'Models' tab and select 'punkt' from under the 'Identifier' column. Then click Download and it will install the necessary files. Then it should work!

The main reason why you see that error is nltk couldn't find punkt package. Due to the size of nltk suite, all available packages are not downloaded by default when one installs it.

You can download punkt package like this.

import nltk
nltk.download('punkt')

from nltk import word_tokenize,sent_tokenize

This is also recommended in the error message in more recent versions:

LookupError: 
**********************************************************************
  Resource punkt not found.
  Please use the NLTK Downloader to obtain the resource:

  >>> import nltk
  >>> nltk.download('punkt')
  
  Searched in:
    - '/root/nltk_data'
    - '/usr/share/nltk_data'
    - '/usr/local/share/nltk_data'
    - '/usr/lib/nltk_data'
    - '/usr/local/lib/nltk_data'
    - '/usr/nltk_data'
    - '/usr/lib/nltk_data'
    - ''
**********************************************************************

If you do not pass any argument to the download function, it downloads all packages i.e chunkers, grammars, misc, sentiment, taggers, corpora, help, models, stemmers, tokenizers.

nltk.download()

The above function saves packages to a specific directory. You can find that directory location from comments here. https://github.com/nltk/nltk/blob/67ad86524d42a3a86b1f5983868fd2990b59f1ba/nltk/downloader.py#L1051

This is what worked for me just now:

# Do this in a separate python interpreter session, since you only have to do it once
import nltk
nltk.download('punkt')

# Do this in your ipython notebook or analysis script
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

sentences = [
    "Mr. Green killed Colonel Mustard in the study with the candlestick. Mr. Green is not a very nice fellow.",
    "Professor Plum has a green plant in his study.",
    "Miss Scarlett watered Professor Plum's green plant while he was away from his office last week."
]

sentences_tokenized = []
for s in sentences:
    sentences_tokenized.append(word_tokenize(s))

sentences_tokenized is a list of a list of tokens:

[['Mr.', 'Green', 'killed', 'Colonel', 'Mustard', 'in', 'the', 'study', 'with', 'the', 'candlestick', '.', 'Mr.', 'Green', 'is', 'not', 'a', 'very', 'nice', 'fellow', '.'],
['Professor', 'Plum', 'has', 'a', 'green', 'plant', 'in', 'his', 'study', '.'],
['Miss', 'Scarlett', 'watered', 'Professor', 'Plum', "'s", 'green', 'plant', 'while', 'he', 'was', 'away', 'from', 'his', 'office', 'last', 'week', '.']]

The sentences were taken from the example ipython notebook accompanying the book "Mining the Social Web, 2nd Edition"

From bash command line, run:

$ python -c "import nltk; nltk.download('punkt')"

This Works for me:

>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download()

In windows you will also get nltk downloader

Simple nltk.download() will not solve this issue. I tried the below and it worked for me:

in the nltk folder create a tokenizers folder and copy your punkt folder into tokenizers folder.

This will work.! the folder structure needs to be as shown in the picture!1