NLTK in research is probably mostly used as glue, its corpus interface, and its standard wrappers to common libraries. Everyone using it for research will do something like &quot;I used data from NLTK, pushed it through my custom parser, and here&#x27;s how it compares to the wrapped parsers that NLTK also interfaces with&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s why the maintainer said, basically, &quot;nope, we only implement the standard algorithms&quot;. Most of the researchers want to get standard data, and compare their new algorithm to the standard algorithms that every other researcher uses.