nltk.TreebankWordTokenizer¶

class nltk.TreebankWordTokenizer[source]¶

The Treebank tokenizer uses regular expressions to tokenize text as in Penn Treebank. This is the method that is invoked by word_tokenize(). It assumes that the text has already been segmented into sentences, e.g. using sent_tokenize().

This tokenizer performs the following steps:

• split standard contractions, e.g. don't -> do n't and they'll -> they 'll

• treat most punctuation characters as separate tokens

• split off commas and single quotes, when followed by whitespace

• separate periods that appear at the end of line

  >>> from nltk.tokenize import TreebankWordTokenizer
  >>> s = '''Good muffins cost $3.88\nin New York.  Please buy me\ntwo of them.\nThanks.'''
  >>> TreebankWordTokenizer().tokenize(s)
  ['Good', 'muffins', 'cost', '$', '3.88', 'in', 'New', 'York.', 'Please', 'buy', 'me', 'two', 'of', 'them.', 'Thanks', '.']
  >>> s = "They'll save and invest more."
  >>> TreebankWordTokenizer().tokenize(s)
  ['They', "'ll", 'save', 'and', 'invest', 'more', '.']
  >>> s = "hi, my name can't hello,"
  >>> TreebankWordTokenizer().tokenize(s)
  ['hi', ',', 'my', 'name', 'ca', "n't", 'hello', ',']