rttk

RTTK is an open‑source software toolkit designed to facilitate the real‑time processing of textual data and structured knowledge. The project was conceived in 2015 by a team of developers at the University of Austria who aimed to provide researchers and developers with an easily extensible library for building chatbots, automated summarizers, and knowledge‑base managers. The first public release, version 0.1, was issued under the MIT license and quickly attracted contributions from the broader Python community.

At its core, RTTK offers a unified interface for parsing natural language, extracting entities, and mapping those entities to an underlying ontological graph. The toolkit integrates popular machine learning backends such as spaCy and Hugging Face transformers, while also providing a lightweight rule‑based engine for custom extraction pipelines. Users can define knowledge graphs using RDF or OWL formats, then query and manipulate those graphs with a SQL‑like query language built into the library.

RTTK emphasizes low latency and resource efficiency. Internally it uses a multi‑threaded architecture that isolates text‑analysis workloads from graph‑processing tasks, allowing developers to deploy the library in real‑time web services, IoT devices, or desktop applications. The toolkit is frequently updated; version 2.0 introduced support for multilingual processing and an asynchronous API.

The community around RTTK is active on GitHub, Discord, and mailing lists. Tutorials and sample projects are available in the official documentation, and many research papers cite RTTK as a baseline for experiments in natural‑language understanding and knowledge representation.