pyconll

Easily work with **CoNLL* files using the familiar syntax of python.*

The current version is 0.2.2. This version is fully functional, stable, tested and documented.

Motivation

When working with the Universal Dependencies project, there are a dissapointing lack of low level APIs. There are many great tools, but few are general purpose enough. Grew is a great tool, but it is slightly limiting for some tasks (and extremely productive for others). Treex is similar to Grew in this regard. CL-CoNLLU is a good tool in this regard, but it is written in a language that many are not familiar with, Common Lisp. UDAPI might fit the bill with its python API, but the package itself is quite large and the documentation impossible to get through. Various more tools can be found on the Universal Dependencies website and all are very nice pieces of software, but most of them are lacking in this desired usage pattern. pyconll creates a thin API on top of raw CoNLL annotations that is simple and intuitive. This is an attempt at a small, minimal, and intuitive package in a popular language that can be used as building block in a complex system or the engine in small one off scripts.

Hopefully, individual researchers will find use in this project, and will use it as a building block for more popular tools. By using pyconll, researchers gain a standardized and feature rich base on which they can build larger projects and not worry about CoNLL annotation and output.

Uses and Limitations

The usage of this package is to enable editing of CoNLL-U format annotations of sentences. Note that this does not include the actual text that is annotated. For this reason, word forms for Tokens are not editable and Sentence Tokens cannot be reassigned. Right now, this package seeks to allow for straight forward editing of annotation in the CoNLL-U format and does not include changing tokenization or creating completely new Sentences from scratch. If there is interest in this feature, it can be revisted for more evaluation.

Installation

As with most python packages, simply use pip to install from PyPi.

pip install pyconll

This package is designed for, and only tested with python 3.4 and above. Backporting to python 2.7 is not in future plans.

Documentation

Documentation is essential to learning how to use any library. The full API documentation can be found online at https://pyconll.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. Examples are also important and a growing number of examples can be found in the examples folder.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to this project you know the drill. Either create an issue and wait for me to repond and fix it or ignore it, or create a pull request or both. When cloning this repo, please run make hooks and pip install -r requirements.txt to properly setup the repo. make hooks setups up the pre-push hook, which ensures the code you push is formatted according to the default YAPF style. pip install -r requirements.txt simply sets up the environment with dependencies like yapf, twine, sphinx, and so on.

README and CHANGELOG

When changing either of these files, please run make docs so that the .rst versions stay in sync. The main version is the markdown version.

Code Formatting

Code formatting is done automatically on push if githooks are setup properly. The code formatter is YAPF, and using this ensures that new code stays in the same style.