title: NLTK Performance
body: <p>Alright, I've been pretty interested in natural language processing recently: however, I've used C until now for most of my work. I heard of NLTK, and I didn't know Python, but it seems quite easy to learn, and it's looking like a really powerful and interesting language. In particular, the NLTK module seems very, very adapted to what I need to do.</p>
  
  <p>However, when using <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/526469/practical-examples-of-nltk-use">sample code for NLTK</a> and pasting that into a file called <code>test.py</code>, I've noticed it takes a very, very long time to run ! </p>
  
  <p>I'm calling it from the shell like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>time python ./test.py
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And on a 2.4 GHz machine with 4 GBs of RAM, it takes 19.187 seconds ! </p>
  
  <p>Now, maybe this is absolutely normal, but I was under the impression that NTLK was <em>extremely</em> fast; I may have been mistaken, but is there anything obvious that I'm clearly doing wrong here?</p>