PyCantonese: Cantonese Linguistics and NLP in Python

PyCantonese is a Python library for Cantonese linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). Currently implemented features (more to come!):

• Accessing and searching corpus data

• Parsing and conversion tools for Jyutping romanization

• Parsing Cantonese text

• Stop words

• Word segmentation

• Part-of-speech tagging

Download and Install

To download and install the stable, most recent version:

$ pip install --upgrade pycantonese

Ready for more? Check out the Quickstart page.

Consulting

If your team would like professional assistance in using PyCantonese, freelance consulting and training services are available for both academic and commercial groups. Please email Jackson L. Lee.

Support

If you have found PyCantonese useful and would like to offer support, buying me a coffee would go a long way!

Links

• Source code: https://github.com/jacksonllee/pycantonese

• Bug tracker: https://github.com/jacksonllee/pycantonese/issues

• Social media: Facebook and Twitter

How to Cite

PyCantonese is authored and maintained by Jackson L. Lee.

A talk introducing PyCantonese:

Lee, Jackson L. 2015. PyCantonese: Cantonese linguistic research in the age of big data. Talk at the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre, Chinese University of Hong Kong. September 15. 2015. Notes+slides

License

MIT License. Please see LICENSE.txt in the GitHub source code for details.

The HKCanCor dataset included in PyCantonese is substantially modified from its source in terms of format. The original dataset has a CC BY license. Please see pycantonese/data/hkcancor/README.md in the GitHub source code for details.

The rime-cantonese data (release 2021.05.16) is incorporated into PyCantonese for word segmentation and characters-to-Jyutping conversion. This data has a CC BY 4.0 license. Please see pycantonese/data/rime_cantonese/README.md in the GitHub source code for details.

Logo

The PyCantonese logo is the Chinese character 粵 meaning Cantonese, with artistic design by albino.snowman (Instagram handle).

Acknowledgments

Wonderful resources with a permissive license that have been incorporated into PyCantonese:

• HKCanCor

• rime-cantonese

Individuals who have contributed feedback, bug reports, etc. (in alphabetical order of last names):

• @cathug

• Litong Chen

• Jenny Chim

• @g-traveller

• Rachel Han

• Ryan Lai

• Charles Lam

• Chaak Ming Lau

• Hill Ma

• @richielo

• @rylanchiu

• Stephan Stiller

• Tsz-Him Tsui

• Robin Yuen

Table of Contents

• Quickstart
• Corpus Data
  • CHAT Format
  • Built-in Data
  • CHILDES and TalkBank Data
  • Custom Data
• Corpus Reader Methods
  • Headers
  • Transcriptions and Annotations
  • Word Frequencies and Ngrams
• Corpus Search Queries
  • Searching by a Jyutping Element
  • Searching by a Chinese Character
  • Searching by a Part-of-speech Tag
  • Searching by a Word or Utterance Range
  • Searching by Multiple Criteria
  • Output Format of Search Results
  • Complex Searches
• Parsing Cantonese Text
  • Input 1: A Plain String
  • Input 2: A List of Strings
  • Input 3: A List of Tuples of Strings
  • Customizing Word Segmentation
  • Customizing Part-of-Speech Tagging
  • Outputting CHAT Data
  • More Customization
• Jyutping Romanization
  • Characters-to-Jyutping Conversion
  • Parsing Jyutping Strings
  • Jyutping-to-Yale Conversion
  • Jyutping-to-TIPA Conversion
• Stop Words
• Word Segmentation
  • Customizing Segmentation
• Part-of-Speech Tagging
• API Reference
  • Corpus Data
  • Jyutping Romanization
  • Natural Language Processing
  • CHATReader
  • Token
  • Jyutping
• Changelog
  • [Unreleased]
  • [3.4.0] - 2021-12-28
  • [3.3.1] - 2021-05-14
  • [3.3.0] - 2021-05-14
  • [3.2.4] - 2021-05-07
  • [3.2.3] - 2021-04-12
  • [3.2.2] - 2021-03-23
  • [3.2.1] - 2021-03-21
  • [3.2.0] - 2021-03-20
  • [3.1.1] - 2021-03-18
  • [3.1.0] - 2021-02-21
  • [3.0.0] - 2020-10-25
  • [2.4.1] - 2020-10-10
  • [2.4.0] - 2020-10-10
  • [2.3.0] - 2020-07-24
  • [2.2.0] - 2018-06-30
  • [2.1.0] - 2018-06-11
  • [2.0.0] - 2016-02-06
  • [1.0] - 2015-09-06
  • [1.0dev] - 2015-09-02
  • [0.2.1] - 2015-01-25
  • [0.2] - 2015-01-22
  • [0.1] - 2014-12-17
• Archives
  • Tutorials
  • Research Outputs