NLTK: Building a Pedagogical Toolkit in Python

Teachers of computational classes are faced with the challenge of setting up a practical programming com- ponent for student assignments and projects. One so- lution is to construct a broad-coverage toolkit, elim- inating overhead and leaving students free to think about the subject matter rather than low-level pro- gramming details. This article discusses the criteria and requirements that should guide the development of a programming toolkit for courseware, and explain how those criteria aected the design and implemen- tation of the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), a broad-coverage toolkit designed for use as computa- tional linguistics courseware.