[ANNOUNCE] Apache OpenNLP 1.8.0 Release

[Joern Kottmann <ko...@gmail.com>]

The Apache OpenNLP team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.8.0
of Apache OpenNLP.

The Apache OpenNLP library is a machine learning based toolkit for the
processing of natural language text.

It supports the most common NLP tasks, such as tokenization, sentence
segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity extraction, chunking,
parsing, and coreference resolution.

The OpenNLP 1.8.0 binary and source distributions are available for
download from our download page:
*https://opennlp.apache.org/download.html
<https://opennlp.apache.org/download.html>*

The OpenNLP library is distributed by Maven Central as well. See the Maven
Dependency page for more details:
https://opennlp.apache.org/maven-dependency.html

Java 1.8 is required to run OpenNLP Maven 3.3.9 is required for building it
Building from the Source Distribution.

To build everything execute the following command in the root folder: mvn
clean install

The results of the build will be placed in:
opennlp-distr/target/apache-opennlp-1.8.0-bin.tar-gz (or .zip)

What's new in Apache OpenNLP 1.8.0

This release introduces many new features, improvements and bug fixes. The
API
has been improved for a better consistency and many deprecated methods were
removed. Java 1.8 is required.

Additionally the release contains the following noteworthy changes:

- POS Tagger context generator now supports feature generation XML
- Add a Name Finder feature generator that adds POS Tag features
- Add CONLL-U format support
- Improve default Name Finder settings
- TokenNameFinderEvaluator CLI now support nameTypes argument
- Stupid backoff is now the default in NGramLanguageModel
- Language codes now are ISO 639-3 compliant
- Add many unit tests
- Distribution package now includes example parameters file
- Now prefix and suffix feature generators are configurable
- Remove API in Document Categorizer for user specified tokenizer
- Learnable lemmatizer now returns all possible lemmas for a given word and
pos tag
- Lemmatizer API backward compatibility break: no need to encode/decode
lemmas anymore, now LemmatizerME lemmatize method returns the actual lemma
- Add stemmer, detokenizer and sentence detection abbreviations for Irish
- Chunker SequenceValidator signature changed to allow access to both token
and POS tag

A detailed list of the issues related to this release can be found in the
release
notes.

Thanks again to all contributors and committers for their help.