NLTK vs Stanford NLP
<p>I have recently started to use NLTK toolkit for creating few solutions using Python.</p>

<p>I hear a lot of community activity regarding using stanford NLP.
Can anyone tell me what is the difference between NLTK and Stanford NLP ? Are they 2 different libraries ? i know that NLTK has an interface to stanford NLP but can anyone throw some light on few basic differences or even more in detail.</p>

<p>Can stanford NLP be used using Python ?</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Can anyone tell me what is the difference between NLTK and Stanford NLP? Are they 2 different libraries ? I know that NLTK has an interface to Stanford NLP but can anyone throw some light on few basic differences or even more in detail.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>(I'm assuming you mean "<a href="http://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/" rel="nofollow">Stanford CoreNLP</a>".)</p>

<p>They are two different libraries.</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Stanford CoreNLP</strong> is written in Java</li>
<li><strong>NLTK</strong> is a Python library</li>
</ul>

<p>The main functional difference is that NLTK has multiple versions or interfaces to other versions of NLP tools, while Stanford CoreNLP only has their version. NLTK also supports installing third-party Java projects, and even includes <a href="https://github.com/nltk/nltk/wiki/Installing-Third-Party-Software#stanford-tagger-ner-tokenizer-and-parser" rel="nofollow">instructions for installing some Stanford NLP packages on the wiki</a>.</p>

<p>Both have good support for English, but if you are dealing with other languages:</p>

<ul>
<li><strong>Stanford CoreNLP</strong> comes with <a href="http://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/human-languages.html" rel="nofollow">models for English, Chinese, French, German, Spanish, and Arabic</a>.</li>
<li><strong>NLTK</strong> comes with <a href="http://www.nltk.org/nltk_data/" rel="nofollow">corpora in additional languages like Portugese, Russian, and Polish</a>. Individual tools may support even more languages (e.g. no Danish corpora, but has a <a href="http://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.stem.html#nltk.stem.snowball.DanishStemmer" rel="nofollow">DanishStemmer</a>).</li>
</ul>

<p>That said, which one is "best" will depend on your specific application and required performance (what features you are using, language, vocabulary, desired speed, etc.).</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Can Stanford NLP be used using Python?</p>
</blockquote>

<p><a href="http://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/other-languages.html#python" rel="nofollow">Yes, there are a number of interfaces and packages for using Stanford CoreNLP in Python</a>  (independent of NLTK).</p>

python nltk stanford-nlp