NLTK

What it is

The Natural Language Toolkit — Python's original NLP library. Tokenizers, stemmers, taggers, corpora, lexical resources. Slower than spaCy in production but unbeatable for prototyping and education.

How Vaaani uses it

• Quick tokenization, stemming and frequency analysis
• Teaching NLP fundamentals to junior team members
• Working with classical corpora (Brown, Reuters, WordNet)
• POC pipelines before re-implementing in spaCy or transformers

Why it makes the cut

Sometimes you don't need a 110MB transformer. NLTK is honest, transparent, and fast enough for small jobs and notebooks.

Sample code

import nltk
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

text = "Vaaani builds AI workers for SMBs."
print(word_tokenize(text))
# ['Vaaani', 'builds', 'AI', 'workers', 'for', 'SMBs', '.']