Displaying Linguistic Structure with CSS
Disclaimer: A lot of the following text is taken directly from http://spacy.io to provide context. This is a pale immitiation of Ines's original work simply because the Displacy website seems to have been brought down recently (for some reason).
spaCy is a library for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The basics are actually quite simple: You can feed spaCy all kinds of texts and it will tell you a lot about those texts in basically no time. For example, it can parse a sentence and tell you everything you want to know about its grammatical structure. This may sound quite abstract and academic (I still have vivid memories of having to draw a bunch of those in uni) and maybe the significance of this is not instantly obvious. But think about it this way:
A syntactic dependency parse is a kind of shallow meaning representation. It's an important piece of many language understanding and text processing technologies. Now that these representations can be computed quickly, and with increasingly high accuracy, they're being used in lots of applications – translation, sentiment analysis, and summarization are major application areas.
This wonderfully small piece of code attempts to replicate (if only awkwardly for my own use) the work of INES MONTANI who has been in charge of developing Display (see the original blog post Displacy).
I cannot state this clearly enough.
This is a pale immitiation of Ines's original work simply because the Displacy website seems to have been brought down recently (for some reason).