Why Even Bother
Brooke M. Fujita edited this page Jan 4, 2018
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9 revisions
MeCab is distributed as a tar-ball of source code that compiles on many different platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Mac OSX, and *BSD. It also is available as a Windows executable. It can be built and run on many different platforms, making it a very convenient and powerful tool when working with Japanese text.
Furthermore, there are bindings available in source-code form for Perl, Python, Java, and even Ruby.
So why even bother creating this package?
- I really enjoy NLP, but I don't like wasting time getting SWIG to compile correctly.
- I wanted to take advantage of Python's good bits, and at the same time hide the complexities of things like string-handling differences between Python 2 and 3.
- I also wanted an API to MeCab that provided easy access to all the wonderful functionality of that package, while hiding the internal implementation details.
- I wanted it to work right out of the box, without a compiler, and even on Windows.
- Just wanted to see how easy/fun it would be to produce a Python package. Sadly, it was neither, but that's a story for another day.