The Classical Language Toolkit
About
The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) offers natural language processing (NLP) support for the languages of Ancient, Classical, and Medieval Eurasia. Greek, Latin, Akkadian, and the Germanic languages are currently most complete. The goals of the CLTK are to:
- compile analysis-friendly corpora;
- collect and generate linguistic data;
- act as a free and open platform for generating scientific research.
Documentation
The docs are at docs.cltk.org.
Installation
CLTK supports Python versions 3.6 and 3.7. The software only runs on POSIX–compliant operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.).
$ pip install cltk
See docs for complete installation instructions.
The CLTK organization curates corpora which can be downloaded directly or, better, imported by the toolkit.
Tutorials
For interactive tutorials, in the form of Jupyter Notebooks, see https://github.com/cltk/tutorials.
Contributing
See the Quickstart for contributors for an overview of the process. If you're looking to start with a small contribution, see the Issue tracker for "easy" jobs needing to be done. Bigger projects may be found at Project ideas page. Of course, new ideas are always welcome.
Citation
Each major release of the CLTK is given a DOI, a type of unique identity for digital documents. This DOI ought to be included in your citation, as it will allow researchers to reproduce your results should the CLTK's API or codebase change. To find the CLTK's current DOI, observe the blue DOI button in the repository's home on GitHub. To the end of your bibliographic entry, append DOI plus the current identifier. You may also add version/release number, located in the pypi button at the project's GitHub repository homepage.
Thus, please cite core software as something like:
Kyle P. Johnson et al.. (2014-2019). CLTK: The Classical Language Toolkit. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.<current_release_id>
A style-neutral BibTeX entry would look like this:
@Misc{johnson2014,
author = {Kyle P. Johnson et al.},
title = {CLTK: The Classical Language Toolkit},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/cltk/cltk}},
note = {{DOI} 10.5281/zenodo.<current_release_id>},
year = {2014--2019},
}
Many contributors have made substantial contributions to the CLTK. For scholarship about particular code, it might be proper to cite these individuals as authors of the work under discussion.
Gratitude
We are thankful for the following organizations that have offered support:
- Google Summer of Code (sponsoring two students, 2016, 2017; three students 2018)
- JetBrains (licenses for PyCharm)
- Google Cloud Platform (with credits for the Classical Language Archive and API)
License
The CLTK is Copyright (c) 2014-2019 Kyle P. Johnson, under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.
