22.7. Conclusion

We chose to use Perl for CS-Web because of the obvious benefits: the LWP modules for web programming, DBD/DBI, mod_perl, and so on. We found that Perl is also a useful tool for doing natural language work. Its text processing features, rapid development cycle, and ability to generate complex data structures on the fly make it particularly appropriate.

A lot of interesting work in natural language research involves analyzing corpus data; collecting statistics about language use over large databases of typical usage. The web is an obvious rich source of this type of data, and in view of this, it is a little surprising how few tools and modules appeared to be available in Perl for this field. Certainly, when we posted about Text::Sentence to a language processing mailing list, there seemed to be quite a lot of interest in what we were doing, as well as extensive Perl expertise in that community. Hopefully, natural language processing will become yet another nut for Perl to crack!