title: Should I use LingPipe or NLTK for extracting names and places?
body: <p>I'm looking to extract names and places from very short bursts of text example</p>
  
  <pre>
   "cardinals vs jays in toronto"
   " Daniel Nestor and Nenad Zimonjic play Jonas Bjorkman w/ Kevin Ullyett, paris time to be announced"
  "jenson button - pole position, brawn-mercedes - monaco".
  </pre>
  
  <p>This data is currently in a MySQL database, and I (pretty much) have a separate record for each athlete, though names are sometimes spelled wrong, etc.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to extract the athletes and locations.
  I usually work in PHP, but haven't been able to find a library for entity extraction (and I may want to get deeper into some <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">NLP</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ML</a> in the future). </p>
  
  <p>From what I've found, <a href="http://alias-i.com/lingpipe/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">LingPipe</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Language_Toolkit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">NLTK</a> seem to be the most recommended, but I can't figure out if either will really suit my purpose, or if something else would be better.  </p>
  
  <p>I haven't programmed in either Java or Python, so before I start learning new languages, I'm hoping to get some advice on what route I should follow, or other recommendations.</p>