These instructions describe how to install NLTK for Python 2.7 on Windows 7. I installed them using Win 7 Professional with SP1)
These instructions assume you have already installed Python 2.7 (32-bit) and set the PATH variable to include 'C:\Python27\' (or wherever you installed Python).
Here are the steps.
1. The best way to install NLTK is using easy-install. This is part of the setuptools package (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools). Download this and install it. [My install used: setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.7.exe]
Be sure to set the path to the easy install directory (If you're like me you might have skipped through the instructions in the install windows, but read this part: "Once installation is complete, you will find an ``easy_install.exe`` program in your Python ``Scripts`` subdirectory. Be sure to add this directory to your ``PATH`` environment variable, if you haven't already done so.")
2. Install NumPy. Download from: http://numpy.scipy.org/. [My install used: numpy-1.6.1-win32-superpack-python2.7.exe]
3. Install PyYAML. Download from: . [My install used: PyYAML-3.10.win32-py2.7.exe]
4. Use easy-install to install NLTK. Just type something similar to the following to install: "\Python27\lib\site-packages\easy_install.py nltk".
5. Install all the corpora required using the following command: "python -m nltk.downloader -d D:\Python27\nltk_data all"
Note that I've used -d D:\Python27\nltk_data. You can exclude this if you just want to install it in the default directory C:\nltk_data. I just wanted to install it in the specified location.
Find more info here: http://www.nltk.org/data
If any packages fail to install just press n on the retry option as shown:
[nltk_data] | Downloading package 'punkt' to
[nltk_data] | D:\Python27\nltk_data...
[nltk_data] | Unzipping tokenizers\punkt.zip.
[nltk_data] | Error with downloaded zip file
Error installing package. Retry? [n/y/e]
n
And run the following at the python command line:
>>> import nltk
>>> nltk.download()
NLTK Downloader
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
d) Download l) List u) Update c) Config h) Help q) Quit
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Downloader> d
Download which package (l=list; x=cancel)?
Identifier> punkt
Downloading package 'punkt' to D:\python27\nltk_data...
Unzipping tokenizers\punkt.zip.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
d) Download l) List u) Update c) Config h) Help q) Quit
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Downloader> q
Good Luck!
