Thinking Clearly .

I’m planning to play around a bit with natural language processing for knowledge acquisition. (Two areas of interest to me: One is helping me, a fairly sophisticated reader, analyze and manage the web pages I read, esp. for the purpose of producing reports, aka blog posts, about a topic. My playing with Diigo is in this vein. The other is a knowledge representation based or enhanced Wikipedia. These two are, obviously, not unrelated.)

My standard first move would be to get a good textbook and start working with Prolog since 1) Prolog has a rich history of use in NLP, 2) I like Prolog, and 3) I really like my favorite Prolog, SWI-Prolog, which has a pretty nice bundled set of libraries and tools. But I just spied NLTK which seems to be an excellent, pedagogically oriented toolkit. I was quite attracted by the tutorial for the older version, but it isn’t clear if it will be updated. (Alas, the NLTK-Lite tutorial is just a set of slides. These are welcome, of course! And I shall definitely read through the older tutorial as well.)

Cypher also seems neat. At least, and as usual, in principle.