[Intro to NLP, CMPSCI 585, Fall 2014]
A few notes (updated 9/10) on running and installing IPython Notebook and Matplotlib. Thanks to Terri Yu for the suggestions and Gregory Shute for additional feedback.
The easiest way to install everything is by getting the Anaconda Python distribution, which has a version of Python packaged together with the many necessary libraries including IPython, Matplotlib, NLTK, etc. It’s available for all platforms. The downside is they want an email address but it appears you can give them a fake one. Software Carpenty recommends this approach.
In particular, Anaconda appears to be the only easy way to get everything running on Windows.
On Mac and Linux, we’ve used the pip install and/or easy_install programs for ipython, matplotlib, and nltk. The pip (or easy_install) command is a package manager for python that knows how to install python libraries.
We are using Python 2.7.
There are some IPython incompatibilities; if your IPython is too old it may not be able to read our notebook file. We made it with IPython 2.2.0, and it appears to work IPython 2.1.0, which is the version in the current version of Anaconda.
In all cases, to do PS1 you will have to run NLTK’s data installer. See the NLTK website for information (or just google, it’s just one python command or so you have to run).