Version 3.0.2 2015-03-13
* make pretty-printing method names consistent
* improvements to Portuguese stemmer
* transition-based dependency parsers
* dependency graph visualisation for ipython notebook
* interfaces for Senna, BLLIP, python-crfsuite
* NKJP corpus reader
* code clean ups, minor bug fixes

Thanks to the following contributors to 3.0.2:
	
Long Duong, Saimadhav Heblikar, Helder, Mikhail Korobov, Denis Krusko,
Alex Louden, Felipe Madrigal, David McClosky, Dmitrijs Milajevs,
Ondrej Platek, Nathan Schneider, Dávid Márk Nemeskey, 0ssifrage, ducki13, kiwipi.

Version 3.0.1 2015-01-12
* fix setup.py for new version of setuptools
	
Version 3.0.0 2014-09-07
* minor bugfixes
* added phrase extraction code by Liling Tan and Fredrik Hedman

Thanks to the following contributors to 3.0.0:
Mark Amery, Ivan Barria, Ingolf Becker, Francis Bond, Lars
Buitinck, Cristian Capdevila, Arthur Darcet, Michelle Fullwood,
Dan Garrette, Dougal Graham, Dan Garrette, Dougal Graham, Lauri
Hallila, Tyler Hartley, Fredrik Hedman, Ofer Helman, Bruce Hill,
Marcus Huderle, Nancy Ide, Nick Johnson, Angelos Katharopoulos,
Ewan Klein, Mikhail Korobov, Chris Liechti, Peter Ljunglof,
Joseph Lynch, Haejoong Lee, Peter Ljunglöf, Dean Malmgren, Rob
Malouf, Thorsten Marek, Dmitrijs Milajevs, Shari A’aidil
Nasruddin, Lance Nathan, Joel Nothman, Alireza Nourian, Alexander
Oleynikov, Ted Pedersen, Jacob Perkins, Will Roberts, Alex
Rudnick, Nathan Schneider, Geraldine Sim Wei Ying, Lynn Soe,
Liling Tan, Louis Tiao, Marcus Uneson, Yu Usami, Steven Xu, Zhe
Wang, Chuck Wooters, lade, isnowfy, onesandzeros, pquentin, wvanlint

Version 3.0b2 2014-08-21
* minor bugfixes and clean-ups
* renamed remaining parse_ methods to read_ or load_, cf issue #656
* added Paice's method of evaluating stemming algorithms

Thanks to the following contributors to 3.0.0b2: Lars Buitinck,
Cristian Capdevila, Lauri Hallila, Ofer Helman, Dmitrijs Milajevs,
lade, Liling Tan, Steven Xu

Version 3.0.0b1 2014-07-11
* Added SentiWordNet corpus and corpus reader
* Fixed support for 10-column dependency file format
* Changed Tree initialization to use fromstring

Thanks to the following contributors to 3.0b1: Mark Amery, Ivan
Barria, Ingolf Becker, Francis Bond, Lars Buitinck, Arthur Darcet,
Michelle Fullwood, Dan Garrette, Dougal Graham, Dan Garrette, Dougal
Graham, Tyler Hartley, Ofer Helman, Bruce Hill, Marcus Huderle, Nancy
Ide, Nick Johnson, Angelos Katharopoulos, Ewan Klein, Mikhail Korobov,
Chris Liechti, Peter Ljunglof, Joseph Lynch, Haejoong Lee, Peter
Ljunglöf, Dean Malmgren, Rob Malouf, Thorsten Marek, Dmitrijs
Milajevs, Shari A’aidil Nasruddin, Lance Nathan, Joel Nothman, Alireza
Nourian, Alexander Oleynikov, Ted Pedersen, Jacob Perkins, Will
Roberts, Alex Rudnick, Nathan Schneider, Geraldine Sim Wei Ying, Lynn
Soe, Liling Tan, Louis Tiao, Marcus Uneson, Yu Usami, Steven Xu, Zhe
Wang, Chuck Wooters, isnowfy, onesandzeros, pquentin, wvanlint
	
Version 3.0a4 2014-05-25
* IBM Models 1-3, BLEU, Gale-Church aligner
* Lesk algorithm for WSD
* Open Multilingual WordNet
* New implementation of Brill Tagger
* Extend BNCCorpusReader to parse the whole BNC
* MASC Tagged Corpus and corpus reader
* Interface to Stanford Parser
* Code speed-ups and clean-ups
* API standardisation, including fromstring method for many objects
* Improved regression testing setup
* Removed PyYAML dependency

Thanks to the following contributors to 3.0a4:
Ivan Barria, Ingolf Becker, Francis Bond, Arthur Darcet, Dan Garrette,
Ofer Helman, Dougal Graham, Nancy Ide, Ewan Klein, Mikhail Korobov,
Chris Liechti, Peter Ljunglof, Joseph Lynch, Rob Malouf, Thorsten Marek,
Dmitrijs Milajevs, Shari A’aidil Nasruddin, Lance Nathan, Joel Nothman,
Jacob Perkins, Lynn Soe, Liling Tan, Louis Tiao, Marcus Uneson, Steven Xu,
Geraldine Sim Wei Ying

Version 3.0a3 2013-11-02
* support for FrameNet contributed by Chuck Wooters
* support for Universal Declaration of Human Rights Corpus (udhr2)
* major API changes:
  - Tree.node -> Tree.label() / Tree.set_label()
  - Chunk parser: top_node -> root_label; chunk_node -> chunk_label
  - WordNet properties are now access methods, e.g. Synset.definition -> Synset.definition()
  - relextract: show_raw_rtuple() -> rtuple(), show_clause() -> clause()
* bugfix in texttiling
* replaced simplify_tags with support for universal tagset (simplify_tags=True -> tagset='universal')
* Punkt default behavior changed to realign sentence boundaries after trailing parenthesis and quotes
* deprecated classify.svm (use scikit-learn instead)
* various efficiency improvements

Thanks to the following contributors to 3.0a3:
Lars Buitinck, Marcus Huderle, Nick Johnson, Dougal Graham, Ewan Klein,
Mikhail Korobov, Haejoong Lee, Peter Ljunglöf, Dean Malmgren, Lance Nathan,
Alexander Oleynikov, Nathan Schneider, Chuck Wooters, Yu Usami, Steven Xu,
pquentin, wvanlint
	
Version 3.0a2 2013-07-12
* speed improvements in word_tokenize, GAAClusterer, TnT tagger, Baum Welch, HMM tagger
* small improvements in collocation finders, probability, modelling, Porter Stemmer
* bugfix in lowest common hypernyn calculation (used in path similarity measures)
* code cleanups, docstring cleanups, demo fixes
	
Thanks to the following contributors to 3.0a2:
Mark Amery, Lars Buitinck, Michelle Fullwood, Dan Garrette, Dougal Graham,
Tyler Hartley, Bruce Hill, Angelos Katharopoulos, Mikhail Korobov,
Rob Malouf, Joel Nothman, Ted Pedersen, Will Roberts, Alex Rudnick,
Steven Xu, isnowfy, onesandzeros

Version 3.0a1 2013-02-14
* reinstated tkinter support (Haejoong Lee)
	
Version 3.0a0 2013-01-14
* alpha release of first version to support Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.

Version 2.0.4 2012-11-07
* minor bugfix (removed numpy dependency)

Version 2.0.3 2012-09-24

* fixed corpus/reader/util.py to support Python 2.5
* make MaltParser safe to use in parallel
* fixed bug in inter-annotator agreement
* updates to various doctests (nltk/test)
* minor bugfixes

Thanks to the following contributors to 2.0.3:
Robin Cooper, Pablo Duboue, Christian Federmann, Dan Garrette, Ewan Klein,
Pierre-François Laquerre, Max Leonov, Peter Ljunglöf, Nitin Madnani, Ceri Stagg

Version 2.0.2 2012-07-05

* improvements to PropBank, NomBank, and SemCor corpus readers
* interface to full Penn Treebank Corpus V3 (corpus.ptb)
* made wordnet.lemmas case-insensitive
* more flexible padding in model.ngram
* minor bugfixes and documentation enhancements
* better support for automated testing

Thanks to the following contributors to 2.0.2:
Daniel Blanchard, Mikhail Korobov, Nitin Madnani, Duncan McGreggor,
Morten Neergaard, Nathan Schneider, Rico Sennrich.

Version 2.0.1 2012-05-15

* moved NLTK to GitHub: http://github.com/nltk
* set up integration testing: https://jenkins.shiningpanda.com/nltk/ (Morten Neergaard)
* converted documentation to Sphinx format: http://nltk.github.com/api/nltk.html
* dozens of minor enhancements and bugfixes: https://github.com/nltk/nltk/commits/
* dozens of fixes for conformance with PEP-8
* dozens of fixes to ensure operation with Python 2.5
* added interface to Lin's Dependency Thesaurus (Dan Blanchard)
* added interface to scikit-learn classifiers (Lars Buitinck)
* added segmentation evaluation measures (David Doukhan)

Thanks to the following	contributors to	2.0.1 (since 2.0b9, July 2010):
Rami Al-Rfou', Yonatan Becker, Steven Bethard, Daniel Blanchard, Lars
Buitinck, David Coles, Lucas Cooper, David Doukhan, Dan Garrette,
Masato Hagiwara, Michael Hansen, Michael Heilman, Rebecca Ingram,
Sudharshan Kaushik, Mikhail Korobov, Peter Ljunglof, Nitin Madnani,
Rob Malouf, Tomonori Nagano, Morten Neergaard, David Nemeskey,
Joel Nothman, Jacob Perkins, Alessandro Presta, Alex Rudnick,
Nathan Schneider, Stefano Lattarini, Peter Stahl, Jason Yoder

Version 2.0.1 (rc1) 2011-04-11

NLTK:
* added interface to the Stanford POS Tagger
* updates to sem.Boxer, sem.drt.DRS
* allow unicode strings in grammars
* allow non-string features in classifiers
* modifications to HunposTagger
* issues with DRS printing
* fixed bigram collocation finder for window_size > 2
* doctest paths no longer presume unix-style pathname separators
* fixed issue with NLTK's tokenize module colliding with the Python tokenize module
* fixed issue with stemming Unicode strings
* changed ViterbiParser.nbest_parse to parse
* ChaSen and KNBC Japanese corpus readers
* preserve case in concordance display
* fixed bug in simplification of Brown tags
* a version of IBM Model 1 as described in Koehn 2010
* new class AlignedSent for aligned sentence data and evaluation metrics
* new nltk.util.set_proxy to allow easy configuration of HTTP proxy
* improvements to downloader user interface to catch URL and HTTP errors
* added CHILDES corpus reader
* created special exception hierarchy for Prover9 errors
* significant changes to the underlying code of the boxer interface
* path-based wordnet similarity metrics use a fake root node for verbs, following the Perl version
* added ability to handle multi-sentence discourses in Boxer
* added the 'english' Snowball stemmer
* simplifications and corrections of Earley Chart Parser rules
* several changes to the feature chart parsers for correct unification
* bugfixes: FreqDist.plot, FreqDist.max, NgramModel.entropy, CategorizedCorpusReader, DecisionTreeClassifier
* removal of Python >2.4 language features for 2.4 compatibility
* removal of deprecated functions and associated warnings
* added semantic domains to wordnet corpus reader
* changed wordnet similarity functions to include instance hyponyms
* updated to use latest version of Boxer

Data:
* JEITA Public Morphologically Tagged Corpus (in ChaSen format)
* KNB Annotated corpus of Japanese blog posts
* Fixed some minor bugs in alvey.fcfg, and added number of parse trees in alvey_sentences.txt
* added more comtrans data

Documentation:
* minor fixes to documentation
* NLTK Japanese book (chapter 12) by Masato Hagiwara

NLTK-Contrib:
* Viethen and Dale referring expression algorithms


Version 2.0b9 2010-07-25

NLTK:
* many code and documentation cleanups
* Added port of Snowball stemmers
* Fixed loading of pickled tokenizers (issue 556)
* DecisionTreeClassifier now handles unknown features (issue 570)
* Added error messages to LogicParser
* Replaced max_models with end_size to prevent Mace from hanging
* Added interface to Boxer
* Added nltk.corpus.semcor to give access to SemCor 3.0 corpus (issue 530)
* Added support for integer- and float-valued features in maxent classifiers
* Permit NgramModels to be pickled
* Added Sourced Strings (see test/sourcedstring.doctest for details)
* Fixed bugs in with Good-Turing and Simple Good-Turing Estimation (issue 26)
* Add support for span tokenization, aka standoff annotation of segmentation (incl Punkt)
* allow unicode nodes in Tree.productions()
* Fixed WordNet's morphy to be consistent with the original implementation,
  taking the shortest returned form instead of an arbitrary one (issues 427, 487)
* Fixed bug in MaxentClassifier
* Accepted bugfixes for YCOE corpus reader (issue 435)
* Added test to _cumulative_frequencies() to correctly handle the case when no arguments are supplied
* Added a TaggerI interface to the HunPos open-source tagger
* Return 0, not None, when no count is present for a lemma in WordNet
* fixed pretty-printing of unicode leaves
* More efficient calculation of the leftcorner relation for left corner parsers
* Added two functions for graph calculations: transitive closure and inversion.
* FreqDist.pop() and FreqDist.popitems() now invalidate the caches (issue 511)

Data:
* Added SemCor 3.0 corpus (Brown Corpus tagged with WordNet synsets)
* Added LanguageID corpus (trigram counts for 451 languages)
* Added grammar for a^n b^n c^n

NLTK-Contrib:
* minor updates

Thanks to the following	contributors to	2.0b9:

Steven Bethard,	Francis Bond, Dmitry Chichkov, Liang Dong, Dan Garrette,
Simon Greenhill, Bjorn Maeland, Rob Malouf, Joel Nothman, Jacob Perkins,
Alberto Planas, Alex Rudnick, Geoffrey Sampson, Kevin Scannell, Richard Sproat


Version 2.0b8 2010-02-05

NLTK:
* fixed copyright and license statements
* removed PyYAML, and added dependency to installers and download instructions
* updated to LogicParser, DRT (Dan Garrette)
* WordNet similarity metrics return None instead of -1 when
  they fail to find a path (Steve Bethard)
* shortest_path_distance uses instance hypernyms (Jordan Boyd-Graber)
* clean_html improved (Bjorn Maeland)
* batch_parse, batch_interpret and batch_evaluate functions allow
    grammar or grammar filename as argument
* more Portuguese examples (portuguese_en.doctest, examples/pt.py)

NLTK-Contrib:
* Aligner implementations (Christopher Crowner, Torsten Marek)
* ScriptTranscriber package (Richard Sproat and Kristy Hollingshead)

Book:
* updates for second printing, correcting errata
  http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/nltk/doc/book/errata.txt

Data:
* added Europarl sample, with 10 docs for each of 11 langs (Nitin Madnani)
* added SMULTRON sample corpus (Torsten Marek, Martin Volk)


Version 2.0b7 2009-11-09

NLTK:
* minor bugfixes and enhancements: data loader, inference package, FreqDist, Punkt
* added Portuguese example module, similar to nltk.book for English (examples/pt.py)
* added all_lemma_names() method to WordNet corpus reader
* added update() and __add__() extensions to FreqDist (enhances alignment with Python 3.0 counters)
* reimplemented clean_html
* added test-suite runner for automatic/manual regression testing

NLTK-Data:
* updated Punkt models for sentence segmentation
* added corpus of the works of Machado de Assis (Brazilian Portuguese)

Book:
* Added translation of preface into Portuguese, contributed by Tiago Tresoldi.

Version 2.0b6 2009-09-20

NLTK:
* minor fixes for Python 2.4 compatibility
* added words() method to XML corpus reader
* minor bugfixes and code clean-ups
* fixed downloader to put data in %APPDATA% on Windows
	
Data:
* Updated Punkt models
* Fixed utf8 encoding issues with UDHR and Stopwords Corpora
* Renamed CoNLL "cat" files to "esp" (different language)
* Added Alvey NLT feature-based grammar
* Added Polish PL196x corpus
	
Version 2.0b5 2009-07-19

NLTK:
* minor bugfixes (incl FreqDist, Python eggs)
* added reader for Europarl Corpora (contributed by Nitin Madnani)
* added reader for IPI PAN Polish Corpus (contributed by Konrad Goluchowski)
* fixed data.py so that it doesn't generate a warning for Windows Python 2.6

NLTK-Contrib:
* updated Praat reader (contributed by Margaret Mitchell) 

Version 2.0b4 2009-07-10

NLTK:
* switched to Apache License, Version 2.0
* minor bugfixes in semantics and inference packages
* support for Python eggs
* fixed stale regression tests

Data:
* added NomBank 1.0
* uppercased feature names in some grammars

Version 2.0b3 2009-06-25

NLTK:
* several bugfixes
* added nombank corpus reader (Paul Bedaride)

Version 2.0b2 2009-06-15

NLTK:
* minor bugfixes and optimizations for parsers, updated some doctests
* added bottom-up filtered left corner parsers,
  LeftCornerChartParser and IncrementalLeftCornerChartParser.
* fixed dispersion plot bug which prevented empty plots

Version 2.0b1 2009-06-09

NLTK:
* major refactor of chart parser code and improved API (Peter Ljungl喃)
* added new bottom-up left-corner chart parser strategy
* misc bugfixes (ChunkScore, chart rules, chatbots, jcn-similarity)
* improved efficiency of "import nltk" using lazy module imports
* moved CCG package and ISRI Arabic stemmer from NLTK-Contrib into core NLTK
* misc code cleanups

Contrib:
* moved out of the main NLTK distribution into a separate distribution

Book:
* Ongoing polishing ahead of print publication

Version 0.9.9 2009-05-06

NLTK:
* Finalized API for NLTK 2.0 and the book, incl dozens of small fixes
* Names of the form nltk.foo.Bar now available as nltk.Bar
  for significant functionality; in some cases the name was modified
  (using old names will produce a deprecation warning)
* Bugfixes in downloader, WordNet
* Expanded functionality in DecisionTree
* Bigram collocations extended for discontiguous bigrams
* Translation toy nltk.misc.babelfish
* New module nltk.help giving access to tagset documentation
* Fix imports so that NLTK builds without Tkinter (Bjorn Maeland)

Data:
* new maxent NE chunker model
* updated grammar packages for the book
* data for new tagsets collection, documenting several tagsets
* added lolcat translation to the Genesis collection

Contrib (work in progress):
* Updates to coreference package (Joseph Frazee)
* New ISRI Arabic stemmer (Hosam Algasaier)
* Updates to Toolbox package (Greg Aumann)

Book:
* Substantial editorial corrections ahead of final submission

Version 0.9.8 2009-02-18

NLTK:
* New off-the-shelf tokenizer, POS tagger, and named-entity tagger
* New metrics package with inter-annotator agreement scores,
  distance metrics, rank correlation
* New collocations package (Joel Nothman)
* Many clean-ups to WordNet package (Steven Bethard, Jordan Boyd-Graber)
* Moved old pywordnet-based WordNet package to nltk_contrib
* WordNet browser (Paul Bone)
* New interface to dependency treebank corpora
* Moved MinimalSet class into nltk.misc package
* Put NLTK applications in new nltk.app package
* Many other improvements incl semantics package, toolbox, MaltParser
* Misc changes to many API names in preparation for 1.0, old names deprecated
* Most classes now available in the top-level namespace
* Work on Python egg distribution (Brandon Rhodes)
* Removed deprecated code remaining from 0.8.* versions
* Fixes for Python 2.4 compatibility

Data:
* Corrected identifiers in Dependency Treebank corpus
* Basque and Catalan Dependency Treebanks (CoNLL 2007)
* PE08 Parser Evalution data
* New models for POS tagger and named-entity tagger

Book:
* Substantial editorial corrections

Version 0.9.7 2008-12-19

NLTK:
* fixed problems with accessing zipped corpora   
* improved design and efficiency of grammars and chart parsers
  including new bottom-up combine strategy and a redesigned
  Earley strategy (Peter Ljunglof)
* fixed bugs in smoothed probability distributions and added
  regression tests (Peter Ljunglof)
* improvements to Punkt (Joel Nothman)
* improvements to text classifiers
* simple word-overlap RTE classifier

Data:
* A new package of large grammars (Peter Ljunglof)
* A small gazetteer corpus and corpus reader
* Organized example grammars into separate packages
* Childrens' stories added to gutenberg package

Contrib (work in progress):
* fixes and demonstration for named-entity feature extractors in nltk_contrib.coref

Book:
* extensive changes throughout, including new chapter 5 on classification
  and substantially revised chapter 11 on managing linguistic data

Version 0.9.6 2008-12-07

NLTK:
* new WordNet corpus reader (contributed by Steven Bethard)
* incorporated dependency parsers into NLTK (was NLTK-Contrib) (contributed by Jason Narad)
* moved nltk/cfg.py to nltk/grammar.py and incorporated dependency grammars
* improved efficiency of unification algorithm
* various enhancements to the semantics package
* added plot() and tabulate() methods to FreqDist and ConditionalFreqDist
* FreqDist.keys() and list(FreqDist) provide keys reverse-sorted by value,
  to avoid the confusion caused by FreqDist.sorted()
* new downloader module to support interactive data download: nltk.download()
  run using "python -m nltk.downloader all"
* fixed WordNet bug that caused min_depth() to sometimes give incorrect result
* added nltk.util.Index as a wrapper around defaultdict(list) plus
  a functional-style initializer
* fixed bug in Earley chart parser that caused it to break
* added basic TnT tagger nltk.tag.tnt
* new corpus reader for CoNLL dependency format (contributed by Kepa Sarasola and Iker Manterola)
* misc other bugfixes

Contrib (work in progress):
* TIGERSearch implementation by Torsten Marek
* extensions to hole and glue semantics modules by Dan Garrette
* new coreference package by Joseph Frazee
* MapReduce interface by Xinfan Meng

Data:
* Corpora are stored in compressed format if this will not compromise speed of access
* Swadesh Corpus of comparative wordlists in 23 languages
* Split grammar collection into separate packages
* New Basque and Spanish grammar samples (contributed by Kepa Sarasola and Iker Manterola)
* Brown Corpus sections now have meaningful names (e.g. 'a' is now 'news')
* Fixed bug that forced users to manually unzip the WordNet corpus
* New dependency-parsed version of Treebank corpus sample
* Added movie script "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" to webtext corpus
* Replaced words corpus data with a much larger list of English words
* New URL for list of available NLTK corpora
  http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/nltk_data/index.xml

Book:
* complete rewrite of first three chapters to make the book accessible
  to a wider audience
* new chapter on data-intensive language processing
* extensive reworking of most chapters
* Dropped subsection numbering; moved exercises to end of chapters

Distributions:
* created Portfile to support Mac installation


Version 0.9.5 2008-08-27

NLTK:
* text module with support for concordancing, text generation, plotting
* book module
* Major reworking of the automated theorem proving modules (Dan Garrette)
* draw.dispersion now uses pylab
* draw.concordance GUI tool
* nltk.data supports for reading corpora and other data files from within zipfiles
* trees can be constructed from strings with Tree(s) (cf Tree.parse(s))

Contrib (work in progress):
* many updates to student projects
  - nltk_contrib.agreement (Thomas Lippincott)
  - nltk_contrib.coref (Joseph Frazee)
  - nltk_contrib.depparser (Jason Narad)
  - nltk_contrib.fuf (Petro Verkhogliad)
  - nltk_contrib.hadoop (Xinfan Meng)
* clean-ups: deleted stale files; moved some packages to misc

Data
* Cleaned up Gutenberg text corpora
* added Moby Dick; removed redundant copy of Blake songs.
* more tagger models
* renamed to nltk_data to facilitate installation
* stored each corpus as a zip file for quicker installation
  and access, and to solve a problem with the Propbank
  corpus including a file with an illegal name for MSWindows
  (con.xml).

Book:
* changed filenames to chNN format
* reworked opening chapters (work in progress)

Distributions:
* fixed problem with mac installer that arose when Python binary
  couldn't be found
* removed dependency of NLTK on nltk_data so that NLTK code can be
  installed before the data

Version 0.9.4 2008-08-01
	
NLTK:
- Expanded semantics package for first order logic, linear logic,
  glue semantics, DRT, LFG (Dan Garrette)
- new WordSense class in wordnet.synset supporting access to synsets
  from sense keys and accessing sense counts (Joel Nothman)
- interface to Mallet's linear chain CRF implementation (nltk.tag.crf)
- misc bugfixes incl Punkt, synsets, maxent
- improved support for chunkers incl flexible chunk corpus reader,
  new rule type: ChunkRuleWithContext
- new GUI for pos-tagged concordancing nltk.draw.pos_concordance
- new GUI for developing regexp chunkers nltk.draw.rechunkparser 
- added bio_sents() and bio_words() methods to ConllChunkCorpusReader in conll.py
    to allow reading (word, tag, chunk_typ) tuples off of CoNLL-2000 corpus. Also 
    modified ConllChunkCorpusView to support these changes.
- feature structures support values with custom unification methods
- new flag on tagged corpus readers to use simplified tagsets
- new package for ngram language modeling with Katz backoff nltk.model
- added classes for single-parented and multi-parented trees that 
  automatically maintain parent pointers (nltk.tree.ParentedTree and
  nltk.tree.MultiParentedTree)
- new WordNet browser GUI (Jussi Salmela, Paul Bone)
- improved support for lazy sequences
- added generate() method to probability distributions
- more flexible parser for converting bracketed strings to trees
- made fixes to docstrings to improve API documentation

Contrib (work in progress)
- new NLG package, FUF/SURGE (Petro Verkhogliad) 
- new dependency parser package (Jason Narad)
- new Coreference package, incl support for
  ACE-2, MUC-6 and MUC-7 corpora (Joseph Frazee)
- CCG Parser (Graeme Gange)
- first order resolution theorem prover (Dan Garrette)

Data:
- Nnw NPS Chat Corpus and corpus reader (nltk.corpus.nps_chat)
- ConllCorpusReader can now be used to read CoNLL 2004 and 2005 corpora.
- Implemented HMM-based Treebank POS tagger and phrase chunker for 
  nltk_contrib.coref in api.py. Pickled versions of these objects are checked
  in in data/taggers and data/chunkers.

Book:
- misc corrections in response to feedback from readers
	
Version 0.9.3 2008-06-03
	
NLTK:
- modified WordNet similarity code to use pre-built information content files
- new classifier-based tagger, BNC corpus reader
- improved unicode support for corpus readers
- improved interfaces to Weka, Prover9/Mace4
- new support for using MEGAM and SciPy to train maxent classifiers
- rewrite of Punkt sentence segmenter (Joel Nothman)
- bugfixes for WordNet information content module (Jordan Boyd-Graber)
- code clean-ups throughout

Book:
- miscellaneous fixes in response to feedback from readers

Contrib:
- implementation of incremental algorithm for generating
  referring expressions (contributed by Margaret Mitchell)
- refactoring WordNet browser (Paul Bone)
  
Corpora:
- included WordNet information content files

Version 0.9.2 2008-03-04

NLTK:
- new theorem-prover and model-checker module nltk.inference,
  including interface to Prover9/Mace4 (Dan Garrette, Ewan Klein)
- bugfix in Reuters corpus reader that causes Python
  to complain about too many open files
- VerbNet and PropBank corpus readers

Data:
- VerbNet Corpus version 2.1: hierarchical, verb lexicon linked to WordNet
- PropBank Corpus: predicate-argument structures, as stand-off annotation of Penn Treebank

Contrib:
- New work on WordNet browser, incorporating a client-server model (Jussi Salmela)

Distributions:
- Mac OS 10.5 distribution
	
Version 0.9.1 2008-01-24

NLTK:
- new interface for text categorization corpora
- new corpus readers: RTE, Movie Reviews, Question Classification, Brown Corpus
- bugfix in ConcatenatedCorpusView that caused iteration to fail if it didn't start from the beginning of the corpus

Data:
- Question classification data, included with permission of Li & Roth
- Reuters 21578 Corpus, ApteMod version, from CPAN
- Movie Reviews corpus (sentiment polarity), included with permission of Lillian Lee
- Corpus for Recognising Textual Entailment (RTE) Challenges 1, 2 and 3
- Brown Corpus (reverted to original file structure: ca01-cr09)
- Penn Treebank corpus sample (simplified implementation, new readers treebank_raw and treebank_chunk)
- Minor redesign of corpus readers, to use filenames instead of "items" to identify parts of a corpus
	
Contrib:
- theorem_prover: Prover9, tableau, MaltParser, Mace4, glue semantics, docs (Dan Garrette, Ewan Klein)
- drt: improved drawing, conversion to FOL (Dan Garrette)
- gluesemantics: GUI demonstration, abstracted LFG code, documentation (Dan Garrette)
- readability: various text readability scores (Thomas Jakobsen, Thomas Skardal)
- toolbox: code to normalize toolbox databases (Greg Aumann)
	
Book:
- many improvements in early chapters in response to reader feedback
- updates for revised corpus readers
- moved unicode section to chapter 3
- work on engineering.txt (not included in 0.9.1)

Distributions:
- Fixed installation for Mac OS 10.5 (Joshua Ritterman)
- Generalize doctest_driver to work with doc_contrib

Version 0.9 2007-10-12

NLTK:
- New naming of packages and modules, and more functions imported into
  top-level nltk namespace, e.g. nltk.chunk.Regexp -> nltk.RegexpParser,
    nltk.tokenize.Line -> nltk.LineTokenizer, nltk.stem.Porter -> nltk.PorterStemmer,
    nltk.parse.ShiftReduce -> nltk.ShiftReduceParser
- processing class names changed from verbs to nouns, e.g.
  StemI -> StemmerI, ParseI -> ParserI, ChunkParseI -> ChunkParserI, ClassifyI -> ClassifierI
- all tokenizers are now available as subclasses of TokenizeI,
  selected tokenizers are also available as functions, e.g. wordpunct_tokenize()
- rewritten ngram tagger code, collapsed lookup tagger with unigram tagger
- improved tagger API, permitting training in the initializer
- new system for deprecating code so that users are notified of name changes.
- support for reading feature cfgs to parallel reading cfgs (parse_featcfg())
- text classifier package, maxent (GIS, IIS), naive Bayes, decision trees, weka support
- more consistent tree printing
- wordnet's morphy stemmer now accessible via stemmer package
- RSLP Portuguese stemmer (originally developed by Viviane Moreira Orengo, reimplemented by Tiago Tresoldi)
- promoted ieer_rels.py to the sem package
- improvements to WordNet package (Jussi Salmela)
- more regression tests, and support for checking coverage of tests
- miscellaneous bugfixes
- remove numpy dependency

Data:
- new corpus reader implementation, refactored syntax corpus readers
- new data package: corpora, grammars, tokenizers, stemmers, samples
- CESS-ESP Spanish Treebank and corpus reader
- CESS-CAT Catalan Treebank and corpus reader
- Alpino Dutch Treebank and corpus reader
- MacMorpho POS-tagged Brazilian Portuguese news text and corpus reader
- trained model for Portuguese sentence segmenter
- Floresta Portuguese Treebank version 7.4 and corpus reader
- TIMIT player audio support

Contrib:
- BioReader (contributed by Carlos Rodriguez)
- TnT tagger (contributed by Sam Huston)
- wordnet browser (contributed by Jussi Salmela, requires wxpython)
- lpath interpreter (contributed by Haejoong Lee)
- timex -- regular expression-based temporal expression tagger

Book:
- polishing of early chapters
- introductions to parts 1, 2, 3
- improvements in book processing software (xrefs, avm & gloss formatting, javascript clipboard)
- updates to book organization, chapter contents
- corrections throughout suggested by readers (acknowledged in preface)
- more consistent use of US spelling throughout
- all examples redone to work with single import statement: "import nltk"
- reordered chapters: 5->7->8->9->11->12->5
  * language engineering in part 1 to broaden the appeal
    of the earlier part of the book and to talk more about
    evaluation and baselines at an earlier stage
  * concentrate the partial and full parsing material in part 2,
    and remove the specialized feature-grammar material into part 3

Distributions:
- streamlined mac installation (Joshua Ritterman)
- included mac distribution with ISO image

Version 0.8 2007-07-01

Code:
- changed nltk.__init__ imports to explicitly import names from top-level modules
- changed corpus.util to use the 'rb' flag for opening files, to fix problems
  reading corpora under MSWindows
- updated stale examples in engineering.txt
- extended feature stucture interface to permit chained features, e.g. fs['F','G']
- further misc improvements to test code plus some bugfixes
Tutorials:
- rewritten opening section of tagging chapter
- reorganized some exercises

Version 0.8b2 2007-06-26

Code (major):
- new corpus package, obsoleting old corpora package
  - supports caching, slicing, corpus search path
  - more flexible API
  - global updates so all NLTK modules use new corpus package
- moved nltk/contrib to separate top-level package nltk_contrib
- changed wordpunct tokenizer to use \w instead of a-zA-Z0-9
  as this will be more robust for languages other than English,
  with implications for many corpus readers that use it
- known bug: certain re-entrant structures in featstruct
- known bug: when the LHS of an edge contains an ApplicationExpression,
    variable values in the RHS bindings aren't copied over when the
    fundamental rule applies
- known bug: HMM tagger is broken
Tutorials:
- global updates to NLTK and docs
- ongoing polishing
Corpora:
- treebank sample reverted to published multi-file structure
Contrib:
- DRT and Glue Semantics code (nltk_contrib.drt, nltk_contrib.gluesemantics, by Dan Garrette)

Version 0.8b1 2007-06-18

Code (major):
- changed package name to nltk
- import all top-level modules into nltk, reducing need for import statements  
- reorganization of sub-package structures to simplify imports
- new featstruct module, unifying old featurelite and featurestructure modules
- FreqDist now inherits from dict, fd.count(sample) becomes fd[sample]
- FreqDist initializer permits: fd = FreqDist(len(token) for token in text)
- made numpy optional
Code (minor):
- changed GrammarFile initializer to accept filename
- consistent tree display format
- fixed loading process for WordNet and TIMIT that prevented code installation if data not installed
- taken more care with unicode types
- incorporated pcfg code into cfg module
- moved cfg, tree, featstruct to top level
- new filebroker module to make handling of example grammar files more transparent
- more corpus readers (webtext, abc)
- added cfg.covers() to check that a grammar covers a sentence
- simple text-based wordnet browser
- known bug: parse/featurechart.py uses incorrect apply() function
Corpora:
- csv data file to document NLTK corpora
Contrib:
- added Glue semantics code (contrib.glue, by Dan Garrette)
- Punkt sentence segmenter port (contrib.punkt, by Willy)
- added LPath interpreter (contrib.lpath, by Haejoong Lee)
- extensive work on classifiers (contrib.classifier*, Sumukh Ghodke)
Tutorials:
- polishing on parts I, II
- more illustrations, data plots, summaries, exercises
- continuing to make prose more accessible to non-linguistic audience
- new default import that all chapters presume: from nltk.book import *
Distributions:
- updated to latest version of numpy
- removed WordNet installation instructions as WordNet is now included in corpus distribution
- added pylab (matplotlib)

Version 0.7.5 2007-05-16

Code:
- improved WordNet and WordNet-Similarity interface
- the Lancaster Stemmer (contributed by Steven Tomcavage)
Corpora:
- Web text samples
- BioCreAtIvE-PPI - a corpus for protein-protein interactions
- Switchboard Telephone Speech Corpus Sample (via Talkbank)
- CMU Problem Reports Corpus sample
- CONLL2002 POS+NER data
- Patient Information Leaflet corpus
- WordNet 3.0 data files
- English wordlists: basic English, frequent words
Tutorials:
- more improvements to text and images

Version 0.7.4 2007-05-01

Code:
- Indian POS tagged corpus reader: corpora.indian
- Sinica Treebank corpus reader: corpora.sinica_treebank
- new web corpus reader corpora.web
- tag package now supports pickling
- added function to utilities.py to guess character encoding
Corpora:
- Rotokas texts from Stuart Robinson
- POS-tagged corpora for several Indian languages (Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu) from A Kumaran
Tutorials:
- Substantial work on Part II of book on structured programming, parsing and grammar
- More bibliographic citations
- Improvements in typesetting, cross references
- Redimensioned images and tables for better use of page space
- Moved project list to wiki
Contrib:
- validation of toolbox entries using chunking
- improved classifiers
Distribution:
- updated for Python 2.5.1, Numpy 1.0.2

Version 0.7.3 2007-04-02
	
* Code:
 - made chunk.Regexp.parse() more flexible about its input
 - developed new syntax for PCFG grammars, e.g. A -> B C [0.3] | D [0.7]
 - fixed CFG parser to support grammars with slash categories
 - moved beta classify package from main NLTK to contrib
 - Brill taggers loaded correctly
 - misc bugfixes
* Corpora:
 - Shakespeare XML corpus sample and corpus reader
* Tutorials:
 - improvements to prose, exercises, plots, images
 - expanded and reorganized tutorial on structured programming
 - formatting improvements for Python listings
 - improved plots (using pylab)
 - categorization of problems by difficulty
Contrib:
 - more work on kimmo lexicon and grammar
 - more work on classifiers

Version 0.7.2 2007-03-01

* Code:
 - simple feature detectors (detect module)
 - fixed problem when token generators are passed to a parser (parse package)
 - fixed bug in Grammar.productions() (identified by Lucas Champollion and Mitch Marcus)
 - fixed import bug in category.GrammarFile.earley_parser
 - added utilities.OrderedDict
 - initial port of old NLTK classifier package (by Sam Huston)
 - UDHR corpus reader
* Corpora:
 - added UDHR corpus (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
     with 10k text samples in 300+ languages
* Tutorials:
 - improved images
 - improved book formatting, including new support for:
   - javascript to copy program examples to clipboard in HTML version,
   - bibliography, chapter cross-references, colorization, index, table-of-contents

* Contrib:
  - new Kimmo system: contrib.mit.six863.kimmo (Rob Speer)
  - fixes for: contrib.fsa (Rob Speer)
  - demonstration of text classifiers trained on UDHR corpus for
      language identification: contrib.langid (Sam Huston)
  - new Lambek calculus system: contrib.lambek
  - new tree implementation based on elementtree: contrib.tree
	
Version 0.7.1 2007-01-14

* Code:
  - bugfixes (HMM, WordNet)

Version 0.7 2006-12-22

* Code:
  - bugfixes, including fixed bug in Brown corpus reader
  - cleaned up wordnet 2.1 interface code and similarity measures
  - support for full Penn treebank format contributed by Yoav Goldberg
* Tutorials:
  - expanded tutorials on advanced parsing and structured programming
  - checked all doctest code
  - improved images for chart parsing
	
Version 0.7b1 2006-12-06
	
* Code:
  - expanded semantic interpretation package
  - new high-level chunking interface, with cascaded chunking
  - split chunking code into new chunk package
  - updated wordnet package to support version 2.1 of Wordnet.
  - prototyped basic wordnet similarity measures
    (path distance, Wu + Palmer and Leacock + Chodorow, Resnik similarity measures.)
  - bugfixes (tag.Window, tag.ngram)
  - more doctests
* Contrib:	
  - toolbox language settings module
* Tutorials:
  - rewrite of chunking chapter, switched from Treebank to CoNLL format as main focus,
    simplified evaluation framework, added ngram chunking section
  - substantial updates throughout (esp programming and semantics chapters)
* Corpora:
  - Chat-80 Prolog data files provided as corpora, plus corpus reader
	
Version 0.7a2 2006-11-13

* Code:
  - more doctest
  - code to read Chat-80 data
  - HMM bugfix
* Tutorials:
  - continued updates and polishing
* Corpora:
  - toolbox MDF sample data

Version 0.7a1 2006-10-29

* Code:
  - new toolbox module (Greg Aumann)
  - new semantics package (Ewan Klein)
  - bugfixes
* Tutorials
  - substantial revision, especially in preface, introduction, words,
    and semantics chapters.
	
Version 0.6.6 2006-10-06

* Code:
  - bugfixes (probability, shoebox, draw)
* Contrib:
  - new work on shoebox package (Stuart Robinson)
* Tutorials:
  - continual expansion and revision, especially on introduction to
    programming, advanced programming and the feature-based grammar chapters.
	
Version 0.6.5 2006-07-09

* Code:
  - improvements to shoebox module (Stuart Robinson, Greg Aumann)
  - incorporated feature-based parsing into core NLTK-Lite
  - corpus reader for Sinica treebank sample
  - new stemmer package
* Contrib:
  - hole semantics implementation (Peter Wang)
  - Incorporating yaml
  - new work on feature structures, unification, lambda calculus
  - new work on shoebox package (Stuart Robinson, Greg Aumann)
* Corpora:
  - Sinica treebank sample	
* Tutorials:
  - expanded discussion throughout, incl: left-recursion, trees, grammars,
    feature-based grammar, agreement, unification, PCFGs,
    baseline performance, exercises, improved display of trees

Version 0.6.4 2006-04-20

* Code:
  - corpus readers for Senseval 2 and TIMIT
  - clusterer (ported from old NLTK)
  - support for cascaded chunkers
  - bugfix suggested by Brent Payne
  - new SortedDict class for regression testing
* Contrib:
  - CombinedTagger tagger and marshalling taggers, contributed by Tiago Tresoldi
* Corpora:
  - new: Senseval 2, TIMIT sample
* Tutorials:
  - major revisions to programming, words, tagging, chunking, and parsing tutorials
  - many new exercises
  - formatting improvements, including colorized program examples
  - fixed problem with testing on training data, reported by Jason Baldridge
	
Version 0.6.3 2006-03-09

* switch to new style classes
* repair FSA model sufficiently for Kimmo module to work	
* port of MIT Kimmo morphological analyzer; still needs lots of code clean-up and inline docs
* expanded support for shoebox format, developed with Stuart Robinson
* fixed bug in indexing CFG productions, for empty right-hand-sides
* efficiency improvements, suggested by Martin Ranang
* replaced classeq with isinstance, for efficiency improvement, as suggested by Martin Ranang
* bugfixes in chunk eval
* simplified call to draw_trees
* names, stopwords corpora
	
Version 0.6.2 2006-01-29

* Peter Spiller's concordancer
* Will Hardy's implementation of Penton's paradigm visualization system
* corpus readers for presidential speeches
* removed NLTK dependency
* generalized CFG terminals to permit full range of characters
* used fully qualified names in demo code, for portability
* bugfixes from Yoav Goldberg, Eduardo Pereira Habkost
* fixed obscure quoting bug in tree displays and conversions
* simplified demo code, fixed import bug
