I think they're just using Node as a JavaScript runtime. It offers a bunch of libraries, an interpreter (V8), a package manager and so on. Additionally, it's more and more likely to be in your package manager, so it's easy to install.
Basically, it's like having an NLP library for Python--it's not just for the language but for the whole ecosystem. The difference is that JavaScript as a language does not provide stuff like modules, so you have to get that from somewhere else, in this case Node.
An NLP API server might be a good fit. It wouldn't be awful to be able to throw lots of data from web scrapers, twitter streaming api, etc to a node server to do NLP. It would also be nice to use for any other node project where you'd benefit from NLP along with whatever else you're doing.
It would be more accurate to say "natural language processing in Javascript". Javascript has a few NLP libraries but afaik there is no clear go-to library yet.
It's great to see more useful libraries like this for node. I recently built a sentiment analysis module for node (https://github.com/thinkroth/Sentimental). I think there's a need for more lower-level libraries like 'Natural' as well as higher-level libraries like 'Sentimental' that focus on one thing and work without much setup.
Yes. If I need to find a module for a node project, NPM is the best place to find it. Many languages/frameworks have a centralized repository to find modules/plugins/extensions.
NPM's search isn't perfect (I don't think you'll find anyone who would argue that it is). The fact that it's all AJAX and isn't well indexed makes it even worse for the people who are google'ing a project. In a perfect world you'd be able to find projects easily however you want to. We live in a flawed world, and NPM's search does a good-enough job of helping you find a module, especially if you know it's name. You can complain about it not being how you'd like, but there's a workable, practical system in place now that you can use. I just don't understand the complaint.
Seconded. I'm new to both NLP and Python, but going through the (free) book Natural Language Processing with Python has been remarkably easy and productive!
I haven't tried running this, but I just spent a little time reading through some of the code. Looks cool: Chris and Rob have made what looks like a good start using Javascript for NLP, wrapped up to use with Node.
The correct Classical plural of radius is indeed radii. As a Latinist, I'd accept radiuses as perhaps even better. Insisting on Classical inflection has a certain element of snobbery to it, IMO.
Currently brainstorming where to take it from here. As mentioned above browser-ifying things is in the cards, and I'm interested in beefing up the classifiers, adding clustering & POS tagging.
Also the current inflection functionality is crappy and needs to be rethought.
