

Natural: Natural Language Processing in Node JS - hendler
https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural

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kstrauser
Textbook example of why geeks [0] shouldn't be allowed to name projects.

 _"What's the name of that package?"

"Natural!"

[runs off to Google to find "natural language processing", gets 9 million hits
(as of today)]

"Dammit!"_

[0] I'm a geek, too, and my project names also suck.

~~~
viscanti
If you're using search.npmjs.org it comes up as the first result. I guess I
don't see the issue.

~~~
Dobbs
Because the only time you try to find a project is on search.npmjs.org?

This is the same problem as "Go". The community has to develop a different
term for googling the project than the project's name.

~~~
viscanti
Yes. If I need to find a module for a node project, NPM is the best place to
find it. Many languages/frameworks have a centralized repository to find
modules/plugins/extensions.

NPM's search isn't perfect (I don't think you'll find anyone who would argue
that it is). The fact that it's all AJAX and isn't well indexed makes it even
worse for the people who are google'ing a project. In a perfect world you'd be
able to find projects easily however you want to. We live in a flawed world,
and NPM's search does a good-enough job of helping you find a module,
especially if you know it's name. You can complain about it not being how
you'd like, but there's a workable, practical system in place now that you can
use. I just don't understand the complaint.

~~~
Dobbs
Documentation, examples, and help. There are plenty of reasons to google for a
project that wouldn't involve using NPM.

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rdtsc
Why would you need an asynchronous callback-based server to do NL? Seems like
a strange fit? Or am I missing something?

~~~
tikhonj
I think they're just using Node as a JavaScript runtime. It offers a bunch of
libraries, an interpreter (V8), a package manager and so on. Additionally,
it's more and more likely to be in your package manager, so it's easy to
install.

Basically, it's like having an NLP library for Python--it's not just for the
language but for the whole ecosystem. The difference is that JavaScript as a
language does not provide stuff like modules, so you have to get that from
somewhere else, in this case Node.

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viscanti
It's great to see more useful libraries like this for node. I recently built a
sentiment analysis module for node
(<https://github.com/thinkroth/Sentimental>). I think there's a need for more
lower-level libraries like 'Natural' as well as higher-level libraries like
'Sentimental' that focus on one thing and work without much setup.

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j2labs
Python hackers should check out NLTK, if they don't already know it.

~~~
SatvikBeri
Seconded. I'm new to both NLP and Python, but going through the (free) book
Natural Language Processing with Python has been remarkably easy and
productive!

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mark_l_watson
I haven't tried running this, but I just spent a little time reading through
some of the code. Looks cool: Chris and Rob have made what looks like a good
start using Javascript for NLP, wrapped up to use with Node.

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ma2rten
This is cool. Only too bad that this only for node. Might also be useful in
the browser.

Also, is radii really the plural of radius? Looks odd.

~~~
chrisumbel
Browser-ifying most of the algorithms is something I had in mind. I'd love to
find some people to help! Volunteers?

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egonschiele
Cool! I'm interested in NLP and might want to help out on this. Do you have a
TODO list / roadmap yet?

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chrisumbel
Currently brainstorming where to take it from here. As mentioned above
browser-ifying things is in the cards, and I'm interested in beefing up the
classifiers, adding clustering & POS tagging.

Also the current inflection functionality is crappy and needs to be rethought.

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NHQ
This is awesome right here.

