python-mecab-ko

What it is and what it does

python-mecab-ko is a Python wrapper around MeCab-ko, a morphological analyzer optimized for Korean. It breaks Korean sentences into morphemes (the smallest meaningful units), tags them with parts of speech, and extracts linguistic features like noun phrases. The package exposes a simple API: create a MeCab instance, then call methods like morphs() to get tokens, nouns() to extract noun phrases, pos() for part-of-speech tags, or parse() for detailed morphological analysis including surface forms, grammatical categories, and inflection information.

The package is built on compiled wheels distributed for modern Python versions (3.10–3.12) across macOS, Linux, and Windows. It depends on python-mecab-ko-dic, a dictionary package that provides the linguistic data MeCab-ko needs to analyze Korean text. Maintenance is dormant—the last release was in July 2024—but the codebase is stable and the package remains functional for Korean NLP tasks.

Use it for:

• Extract morphemes and parts of speech from Korean text for downstream NLP pipelines or linguistic analysis.
• Build Korean search engines or information retrieval systems by tokenizing and analyzing Korean queries and documents.
• Develop Korean chatbots or dialogue systems that need to parse and understand Korean user input.
• Analyze Korean social media, news, or user-generated content for sentiment analysis or topic modeling.
• Create Korean text preprocessing pipelines for machine learning models that require tokenized or lemmatized input.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Provides Python bindings for MeCab-ko, a morphological analyzer for Korean text that segments sentences into morphemes and extracts parts of speech.

Yes, if you need Korean morphological analysis. The package is stable, well-documented, and covers a core use case (Korean tokenization and POS tagging) with a clean API. Dormant maintenance is not a blocker for a mature linguistic tool, but verify that python-mecab-ko-dic is available and compatible with your environment before committing. No known vulnerabilities.

Install

python-mecab-ko on PyPI

pip install python-mecab-ko

uv add python-mecab-ko

poetry add python-mecab-ko

Installing python-mecab-ko

Before you install

Medium install friction due to compiled wheel dependencies across multiple platforms (macOS, Linux, Windows, ARM). Dormant maintenance status—last release 2024-07-14, no commits since then, but repository remains active and the package is stable at version 1.3.7.

License in practice

BSD 3-Clause License (permissive) allows commercial and private use with minimal restrictions, requiring only license and copyright notice retention.

Quickstart

pip install python-mecab-ko

from mecab import MeCab
mecab = MeCab()
mecab.morphs('영등포구청역에 있는 맛집 좀 알려주세요.')
# Returns: ['영등포구청역', '에', '있', '는', '맛집', '좀', '알려', '주', '세요', '.']

Requires python-mecab-ko-dic runtime dependency; compiled wheels available for Python 3.10–3.12 on macOS, Linux, and Windows (x86_64, ARM, i686 architectures).

Verify before relying

• Whether python-mecab-ko-dic is automatically installed as a dependency or must be installed separately.
• Performance characteristics and memory footprint for large-scale Korean text processing.
• Compatibility with Korean text encodings beyond UTF-8.

Package facts

Evidence: python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_17_i686.manylinux2014_i686.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-win32.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-win_amd64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp310-cp310-win_arm64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-manylinux_2_17_i686.manylinux2014_i686.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-manylinux_2_17_x86_64.manylinux2014_x86_64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-win32.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp311-cp311-win_arm64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp312-cp312-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp312-cp312-macosx_11_0_arm64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp312-cp312-manylinux_2_17_aarch64.manylinux2014_aarch64.whl; python_mecab_ko-1.3.7-cp312-cp312-manylinux_2_17_i686.manylinux2014_i686.whl

Keywords: mecab, mecab-ko

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