Advanced Usage: Overriding Models and the Blobber Class

TextBlob allows you to specify which algorithms you want to use under the hood of its simple API.

Sentiment Analyzers

New in version 0.5.0.

The textblob.sentiments module contains two sentiment analysis implementations, PatternAnalyzer (based on the pattern library) and NaiveBayesAnalyzer (an NLTK classifier trained on a movie reviews corpus).

The default implementation is PatternAnalyzer, but you can override the analyzer by passing another implementation into a TextBlob’s constructor.

For instance, the NaiveBayesAnalyzer returns its result as a namedtuple of the form: Sentiment(classification, p_pos, p_neg).

>>> from textblob import TextBlob
>>> from textblob.sentiments import NaiveBayesAnalyzer
>>> blob = TextBlob("I love this library", analyzer=NaiveBayesAnalyzer())
>>> blob.sentiment
Sentiment(classification='pos', p_pos=0.7996209910191279, p_neg=0.2003790089808724)

Tokenizers

New in version 0.4.0.

The words and sentences properties are helpers that use the textblob.tokenizers.WordTokenizer and textblob.tokenizers.SentenceTokenizer classes, respectively.

You can use other tokenizers, such as those provided by NLTK, by passing them into the TextBlob constructor then accessing the tokens property.

>>> from textblob import TextBlob
>>> from nltk.tokenize import TabTokenizer
>>> tokenizer = TabTokenizer()
>>> blob = TextBlob("This is\ta rather tabby\tblob.", tokenizer=tokenizer)
>>> blob.tokens
WordList(['This is', 'a rather tabby', 'blob.'])

You can also use the tokenize([tokenizer]) method.

>>> from textblob import TextBlob
>>> from nltk.tokenize import BlanklineTokenizer
>>> tokenizer = BlanklineTokenizer()
>>> blob = TextBlob("A token\n\nof appreciation")
>>> blob.tokenize(tokenizer)
WordList(['A token', 'of appreciation'])

Noun Phrase Chunkers

TextBlob currently has two noun phrases chunker implementations, textblob.np_extractors.FastNPExtractor (default, based on Shlomi Babluki’s implementation from this blog post) and textblob.np_extractors.ConllExtractor, which uses the CoNLL 2000 corpus to train a tagger.

You can change the chunker implementation (or even use your own) by explicitly passing an instance of a noun phrase extractor to a TextBlob’s constructor.

>>> from textblob import TextBlob
>>> from textblob.np_extractors import ConllExtractor
>>> extractor = ConllExtractor()
>>> blob = TextBlob("Python is a high-level programming language.", np_extractor=extractor)
>>> blob.noun_phrases
WordList(['python', 'high-level programming language'])

POS Taggers

TextBlob currently has two POS tagger implementations, located in textblob.taggers. The default is the PatternTagger which uses the same implementation as the pattern library.

The second implementation is NLTKTagger which uses NLTK’s TreeBank tagger. Numpy is required to use the NLTKTagger.

Similar to the tokenizers and noun phrase chunkers, you can explicitly specify which POS tagger to use by passing a tagger instance to the constructor.

>>> from textblob import TextBlob
>>> from textblob.taggers import NLTKTagger
>>> nltk_tagger = NLTKTagger()
>>> blob = TextBlob("Tag! You're It!", pos_tagger=nltk_tagger)
>>> blob.pos_tags
[(Word('Tag'), u'NN'), (Word('You'), u'PRP'), (Word('''), u'VBZ'), (Word('re'), u'NN'), (Word('It')
, u'PRP')]

Parsers

New in version 0.6.0.

Parser implementations can also be passed to the TextBlob constructor.

>>> from textblob import TextBlob
>>> from textblob.parsers import PatternParser
>>> blob = TextBlob("Parsing is fun.", parser=PatternParser())
>>> blob.parse()
'Parsing/VBG/B-VP/O is/VBZ/I-VP/O fun/VBG/I-VP/O ././O/O'

Blobber: A TextBlob Factory

New in 0.4.0.

It can be tedious to repeatedly pass taggers, NP extractors, sentiment analyzers, classifiers, and tokenizers to multiple TextBlobs. To keep your code DRY, you can use the Blobber class to create TextBlobs that share the same models.

First, instantiate a Blobber with the tagger, NP extractor, sentiment analyzer, classifier, and/or tokenizer of your choice.

>>> from textblob import Blobber
>>> from textblob.taggers import NLTKTagger
>>> tb = Blobber(pos_tagger=NLTKTagger())

You can now create new TextBlobs like so:

>>> blob1 = tb("This is a blob.")
>>> blob2 = tb("This is another blob.")
>>> blob1.pos_tagger is blob2.pos_tagger
True