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FastText VS NLTK

Compare FastText VS NLTK and see what are their differences

FastText logo FastText

Library for efficient text classification and representation learning

NLTK logo NLTK

NLTK is a platform for building Python programs to work with human language data.
  • FastText Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-05-27
  • NLTK Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-25

FastText features and specs

  • Speed
    FastText is known for its quick training and inference times, making it suitable for applications requiring real-time processing.
  • Performance
    It often performs well on text classification tasks, benefiting from its ability to capture subword information which helps with understanding out-of-vocabulary words.
  • Efficiency
    It is efficient in terms of memory and computational resources, which makes it applicable to resource-constrained environments.
  • Multilingual Support
    FastText supports multiple languages and can work effectively with texts in different languages, enhancing its versatility.
  • Pre-trained Models
    It offers pre-trained models for numerous languages, facilitating quick experimentation and integration without the need for extensive training from scratch.

Possible disadvantages of FastText

  • Limited Contextuality
    FastText does not capture long-range dependencies as effectively as more advanced models like BERT or GPT, limiting its performance on tasks requiring deeper contextual understanding.
  • Simplistic Representations
    The embeddings generated by FastText are relatively simple compared to those from transformers, potentially leading to lower performance on complex tasks.
  • Unsupervised Limitations
    While FastText is strong for supervised learning tasks, its capabilities in unsupervised learning and transfer learning are not as robust as those found in more modern architectures.
  • Lack of Deep Architecture
    FastText lacks the deep architecture found in neural transformer models, which limits its ability to model complex syntactic and semantic relationships.

NLTK features and specs

  • Comprehensive Library
    NLTK offers a wide range of tools and resources for various NLP tasks, including tokenization, parsing, and semantic reasoning, making it a versatile library for text processing.
  • Educational Resource
    NLTK is well-documented and includes many tutorials and examples, which makes it an excellent tool for learning and teaching natural language processing.
  • Pre-trained Models
    NLTK provides access to several pre-trained models and corpora, saving users time and effort required for training from scratch.
  • Python Integration
    Being a Python library, NLTK easily integrates with other Python-based tools and libraries, allowing for smooth workflow integration.

Possible disadvantages of NLTK

  • Performance Limitations
    NLTK can be slower than other modern NLP libraries like spaCy when processing large datasets, making it less suitable for performance-critical applications.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    While NLTK is comprehensive, its extensive range of features and options may be overwhelming for beginners who are new to NLP.
  • Outdated in Some Areas
    As NLP has rapidly evolved, some parts of NLTK's offering are less up-to-date compared to newer libraries or methodologies in NLP.
  • Limited Neural Network Support
    NLTK primarily focuses on traditional NLP approaches and lacks built-in support for modern deep learning frameworks that are available in libraries like TensorFlow or PyTorch.

FastText videos

Beyond word2vec: GloVe, fastText, StarSpace - Konstantinos Perifanos

More videos:

  • Tutorial - fastText Python Tutorial- Text Classification and Word Representation- Part 1
  • Review - [Paper Reivew] FastText: Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information

NLTK videos

29 Python NLTK Text Classification Sentiment Analysis movie reviews

More videos:

  • Review - Tutorial 24: Sentiment Analysis of Amazon Reviews using NLTK VADER MODULE PYTHON with [SOURCE CODE]

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to FastText and NLTK)
NLP And Text Analytics
33 33%
67% 67
Spreadsheets
29 29%
71% 71
Natural Language Processing
Data Science And Machine Learning

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

FastText might be a bit more popular than NLTK. We know about 4 links to it since March 2021 and only 3 links to NLTK. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

FastText mentions (4)

  • Building a New Latin Translator | Progress + Need Verification on Conjugations Before I process every word I have available into about 900,000 total forms.
    Here is one library that will be used for the training https://fasttext.cc/ this allows for the consensus across multiple languages so that we can define our mystery word correctly. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Show HN: The Sample – newsletters curated for you with machine learning
    (response to edit) > The classification problem is interesting though. I ended up with a long list of hundreds of topics. Most articles fall in two or more. There's also a sub-problem of clustering news by subject. Yeah, certainly difficult. I'm doing it partially manually right now but also with fastText[1]. I'd like to switch completely to fastText soon though since more often than not the newsletters I add... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago
  • Show HN: The Sample – newsletters curated for you with machine learning
    I'm planning to build a business on this, so probably won't open-source it--but I'm always looking for interesting things to write about! I write a weekly newsletter called Future of Discovery[1]; I might write up some more implementation details there in a week or two. In the mean time, most of the heavy lifting is done by the Surprise python lib[2]. It's pretty easy to play around with, just give it a csv of... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago
  • Virtual Sommelier, text classifier in the browser
    FastText is a Facebook tool that, among other things, is used to train text classification models. Unlike Tensorflow.js, it is more intended to work with text so we don't need to pass a tensor and we can use the text directly. Training a model with it is much faster and there are fewer hyperparameters. Besides, to use the model from the browser is possible through WebAssembly. So it's a good alternative to try.... - Source: dev.to / about 4 years ago

NLTK mentions (3)

  • Just created an app to help me practice my Polish grammar. The passages are from classical literature available in the public domain. If you would like to try it, the link is in the comments.
    To give you some further inspiration, you might want to check out the NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit - https://www.nltk.org/ ). It is a huge collection of tools for language data processing in general. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Which not so well known Python packages do you like to use on a regular basis and why?
    I work mostly in the NLP space, so other libraries I like are spaCy, nltk, and pynlp lib. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How to make/program an AI? Is it even possible?
    Learn some Python and play around with existing AI libraries. Go through things like nltk.org and some freecodecamp tutorials to get some hands-on knowledge. Follow this sub and watch the kinds of projects people are creating. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing FastText and NLTK, you can also consider the following products

spaCy - spaCy is a library for advanced natural language processing in Python and Cython.

Gensim - Gensim is a Python library for topic modelling, document indexing and similarity retrieval with large corpora.

Amazon Comprehend - Discover insights and relationships in text

Google Cloud Natural Language API - Natural language API using Google machine learning

rasa NLU - A set of high level APIs for building your own language parser

FuzzyWuzzy - FuzzyWuzzy is a Fuzzy String Matching in Python that uses Levenshtein Distance to calculate the differences between sequences.