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I just read a fascinating article about how MALLET could be used for topic modelling, but I couldn’t find anything online comparing MALLET to NLTK, which I’ve already had some experience with.
What are the main differences between them? Is MALLET a more ‘complete’ resource (e.g. has more tools and algorithms under the hood)? Or where are some good articles answering these first two questions?
It’s not that one is more complete than the other it is more a question of one having some stuff the other doesn’t and vice versa. It also a question of intended audience and purpose.
Mallet is a Java based machine learning toolkit that aims to provide robust and fast implementations for various natural language processing tasks.
NLTK is built using Python and comes with a lot of extra stuff like corpora such as WordNet. NLTK is aimed more at people learning NLP, and as such is used more as a learning platform and perhaps less as an engineering solution.
In my opinion the main difference between the two is that NLTK is better positioned as a learning resource for people interested in machine learning and NLP as it comes with a whole ton of documentation, examples, corpora etc. etc.
Mallet is more aimed at researchers and practitioners that work in the field and already know what they want to do. It comes with less documentation (although it has good examples and the API is well documented) compared to NLTK’s extensive collection of general NLP stuff.
UPDATE:
Good articles describing these would be the Mallet docs and examples at http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/ – the sidebar has links to sequence tagging, topic modelling etc.
and for NLTK the NLTK book Natural Language Processing with Python is a good introduction both to NLTK and to NLP.
UPDATE
I’ve recently found the sklearn Python library. This is aimed at machine learning more generally, not directly for NLP but can be used for that as well. It comes with a very large selection of modelling tools and most of it seems to rely on NumPy so it should be pretty fast. I’ve used it quite a bit and can say that it is very well written and documented and has an active developer community pushing it forward (as of May 2013 at least).
UPDATE 2
I’ve now also been using mallet for some time (specifically the mallet API) and can say that if you’re planning on integrating mallet into another project you should be very familiar with Java and ready to spend a lot of time debugging an almost completely undocumented code base.
If all you want to do is to use the mallet command line tools, that’s fine, using the API requires a lot of digging through the mallet code itself and usually fixing some bugs as well. Be warned mallet comes with minimal documentation with regards to the API.