NLTK

NLTK is the classic library for teaching and researching NLP. While slower than spaCy, it offers comprehensive linguistic data.

When to Use

• Classical NLP & Linguistics: Tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and syntactic parsing.
• Rule-Based Sentiment Analysis: Quick heuristic sentiment scoring with VADER for social media texts.
• Text Preprocessing for Classical ML: Cleaning corpus text for TF-IDF, Naive Bayes, and SVM models.
• Educational & Linguistic Research: Analyzing word frequencies, collocations, and lexical dispersion across corpora.

Quick Start

import nltk
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.corpus import stopwords