A simple package with simple intentions. Easily manipulate conll files using the familiar syntax of python. The current version is 0.1. This is a pretty stable version, passes a lot of tests and has full functionality essentially. The only thing that is missing is documentation which will be coming soon.
When working with the Universal Dependencies project, I was dissapointed with the lack of good API options for maniuplating the conll files. There are plenty of good tools, but none of which are general purpose enough. Grew is a great tool, that I found was slightly limiting for some tasks (and extremely productive for others). Treex is similar to grew in this regard. CL-CoNLLU is essentailly what I needed, but it is written in a language that many are not familiar with, Lisp. UDAPI might fit the bill with its python API, but the package itself is quite large and the documentation impossible to get through. Other tools can be found on the Universal Dependencies page and all are very nice pieces of software. But I found that all of them were lacking for my usage pattern. I was looking for a thin API on top of raw CoNLL-U annotations that was simple and intuitive. This is my attempt at a small, minimal, and intuitive package in a popular language that can be used as one step a in complex systems or small one off scripts.
I hope that individual researchers will find use in this project, and that they can 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.
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 is easy like 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 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 I've created a few examples to see usage of this library in the examples folder. These examples can also be found on the online documentation.
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 PR (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.