This guide will explain how to use the Stanford Natural Language Parser via the Natural Language Toolkit. This allows you to generate parse trees for sentences:

Generated using 6 lines of Python code

Requirements

You will need the following libraries:

• Java Development Kit (JDK) 8
• Stanford Parser
• Python 2.7
• Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)

Installing the JDK

1. Visit Oracle’s website and download the latest version of JDK 8 for your Operating System
2. Set the environment variable JAVAHOME to the location of your JDK. This will be somewhere like /usr/jdk/jdk1.6.0_02 or C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_02.

Note: Do not set JAVAHOME to the JDK’s \bin folder. This is not the JRE, this is the JDK.

Installing the Stanford Parser

1. Download the latest version of the Stanford Parser
2. Extract it to a location of your choice
3. Set the environment variables CLASSPATH and STANFORD_MODELS to the location of the Stanford Parser. Make sure you don’t accidentally leave the Stanford Parser wrapped in another directory e.g. C:\stanford-parser\stanford-parser\[bunch of files].

Adapted from NLTK documentation

Installing Python

1. Visit Python’s website
2. Download the latest release of Python 2.7
3. Run the installer

Installing the NLTK

1. Open a command prompt with admin permissions and run pip install nltk
2. You’re done (ain’t package managers grand?)

Testing your setup

To test if you’ve followed the instructions correctly run the following code (source):

import os
from nltk.parse import stanford

parser = stanford.StanfordParser()
sentences = parser.raw_parse_sents(("Hello, My name is Melroy.", "What is your name?"))
print sentences

# GUI
for line in sentences:
    for sentence in line:
        sentence.draw()

When running the code you should see two images of parse trees. One image for each of the input sentences: