hooray for Haskell NLP activity!

[Daniël de Kok]

On Nov 26, 2010, at 10:04 AM, Eric Kow wrote:
> Woo! It's nice to see this list picking up.
> 
> 1. It's great to see all the tools that people are releasing on hackage.
>   We now have 23 packages listed on
>    <http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html#cat:natural language processing>

And there are some related packages, that are not in the NLP category. For instance, there is the lbfgs parameter estimator package, and we are working on a maximum entropy modeling package based on that. While it's not NLP-specific, its development is NLP driven.

>   What I would love to see now is somebody saying something along the
>   lines of "I built Cool Tool X by combining Y package with Z package"
>   [where Y and Z are built by different teams with different agendas]

Indeed, that would be a good testimony to Haskell and Hackage. Additionally, I think it is important that:

- Y actually works with Z. It would help if someone keeps an eye on that, and persuades package developers to care about inter-package compatibility.
- There is a good overview of the packages that are available, and how they can be combined to perform specific tasks. (E.g. package A provides parsing algorithms, and package B provides everything necessary to train and apply a disambiguation model.)

> 2. The Haskell NLP project could use a maintainer. Anybody interested?
>   Your job is to figure out the Haskell NLP mission is and how to go
>   about fulfilling it.
> 
>   Right now it has a basic mission of building a Haskell NLP community
>   (ie. everybody doing NLP in Haskell should know [a] that other people
>   are working on NLP in Haskell and [b] who they are and what they're
>   doing or [b2] where to find them).

Indeed, that would be very useful!

> * chartparser (still in progress): general purpose library for building
[...]
> * GenI (hackage, there's a user list you can subscribe and send patches
[...]
> * fullstop: a laughably stupid sentence segmenter (on hackage)

Nice work!

Take care,
Daniël