Is there a better tool than opencalais?

Question

Opencalais lets you submit a string (REST API) ....and it will analyze that string and break it down into named-entities, relationships, keywords, etc.

Are there better tools other than opencalais? (both free and commercial)

Answer 1

I presume that you have done an unsuccessful web search or you don't even know what to search exactly.

So, first I give you pertinent keywords: Information Extraction (IE) of which Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a subtask.

Indeed OpenCalais is listed in that Wikipedia article under Free or Open Source Information Extraction Software or Services heading. The two other listed are:

• MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit);
• GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering),

both Java-based. Finding other tools is a simple matter of web searching.

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UPDATE: I see that you mention an Open Source Python-based tool, the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), in this question. I'm curious: what it misses to be applicable to your software?

Clarifying question: do you need a web-service specifically? For example, I found a company, Complexity Intelligence, which offers Part Of Speech (POS) Tagging and Entity Extraction at free and paid monthly subscriptions, mentioned in a thread here.

Caution: I'm not familiar with all these tools, so I cannot say which is better.