CoreNLP VS NLTK

The Stanford CoreNLP Model

If your looking at spacy have a look at Apache OpenNLP and Core NLP.

Tokenize with NLTK, SpaCy or CoreNLP

It should not take nearly that long. However, again I must recommend you take this conversation to github

Stanford has a great program and the Stanford NLP Group maintains CoreNLP which I have used before.

So why not use the Stanford CoreNLP library?

If you need NER, there’s no need to implement it yourself. There are several popular libraries that can do this for you nowadays. Five of these libraries, Stanford CoreNLP, NLTK, OpenNLP, SpaCy, and GATE, were already mentioned in the title.

Check something like this out to start: https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/

You don't actually even need to learn how to do deep learning if you're doing something fairly basic, which it sounds like you are. There are a lot of good tools you can use basically straight out of the box for something like this. Check out https://huggingface.co/course/chapter1, https://course.spacy.io/en/, https://guide.allennlp.org/ and https://www.nltk.org/book/. If java's more your thing, add https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/ to the list.

To give a contrasting perspective, I think the Java ecosystem is much better suited for many data science tasks, and has a growing and well-maintained set of libraries for general purpose machine learning. I won't list them all, but TF-Java, DJL et al. have implementations of many modern architectures and there are a number of excellent libraries (CoreNLP, Lucene et al.) for working with text.

alternatively, could we not simply split by common characters such as newlines and periods, to split it within sentences? it would be fragile with special handling required for numbers with decimal points and probably various other edge cases, though.

there are also Python libraries meant for natural language parsing[0] that could do that task for us. I even see examples on stack overflow[1] that simply split text into sentences.

[0]: https://www.nltk.org/

Check out https://www.nltk.org/ and work through it, it'll give you a foundational understanding of how all this works, but very basically it's just a fancy auto-complete.

NLTK Documentation

If this is True, then you need also Natural Language Toolkit to process the words.

In that case, you should definitely have a look at Python's nltk library which stands for Natural Language Toolkit. They have a rich corpus collection for all kinds of specialized things like grammars, taggers, chunkers, etc.

If not, start with Python's Natural Language Toolkit.

Try https://www.nltk.org it runs you through the basics. The book is here

In terms of programming languages, Python is a great first programming language. the learnpython subreddit has lots of good recommendations for resources to get started. Once you're comfortable with the language, NLTK would be a good place to start, and the docs have heaps of examples. Check it out https://www.nltk.org/

The most popular library to do this is NLTK though I believe you can use some of the popular AI API services today as well. Bloomberg launched one.