PyCon 2012 just released a CFP, and NLTK shows up 3 times in the suggested topics. While I’ve never done this before, I know stuff about Text Processing with NLTK so I’m going to submit a tutorial abstract. But I want your feedback: what exactly should this tutorial cover? If you could attend a 3 hour class on NLTK, what knowledge & skills would you like to come away with? Here are a few specific topics I could cover:

• part-of-speech tagging & chunking
• text classification
• creating a custom corpus and corpus reader
• training custom models (manually and/or with nltk-trainer)
• bootstrapping a custom corpus for text classification

Or I could do a high-level survey of many NLTK modules and corpora. Please let me know what you think in the comments, if you plan on going to PyCon 2012, and if you’d want to attend a tutorial on NLTK. You can also contact me directly if you prefer.

Co-Hosting

If you’ve done this kind of thing before, have some teaching and/or speaking experience, and you feel you could add value (maybe you’re a computational linguist or NLP’er and/or have used NLTK professionally), I’d be happy to work with a co-host. Contact me if you’re interested, or leave a note in the comments.