This Python package provides efficient linguistic feature extraction for text datasets (i.e. datasets with N text instances, in a tabular structure).

For a full overview of the features available, check the overview table, for further details and tutorials check the documentation.

The multilingual support is documented in the multilingual support table.

Install this package using the current PyPI version

python -m pip install elfen

Install this package from source

python -m pip install git+https://github.com/mmmaurer/elfen.git

If you want to use the spacy backbone, you will need to download the respective model, e.g. "en_core_web_sm":

python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

To use wordnet features, download open multilingual wordnet using:

python -m wn download omw:1.4

Note that for some languages, you will need to install another wordnet collection. For example, for German, you can use the following command:

python -m wn download odenet:1.4

For more information on the available wordnet collections, consult the wn package documentation.

The underlying dataframe library, polars, uses all available cores by default. If you are working on a shared server, you may want to consider limiting the resources available to polars. To do that, you will have to set the POLARS_MAX_THREADS variable in your shell, e.g.:

export POLARS_MAX_THREADS=8

The extraction of psycholinguistic, emotion/lexicon and semantic features relies on third-party resources such as lexicons. Please refer to the original author's licenses and conditions for usage, and cite them if you use the resources through this package in your analyses.

For an overview which features use which resource, and how to export all third-party resource references in a bibtex string, consult the documentation.

While all feature extraction functions in this package are written from scratch, the choice of features in the readability and lexical richness feature areas (partially) follows the readability and lexicalrichness Python packages.

We use the wn Python package to extract Open Multilingual Wordnet synsets.

If you use this package in your work, for now, please cite

@misc{maurer-2025-elfen,
  author = {Maurer, Maximilian},
  title = {ELFEN - Efficient Linguistic Feature Extraction for Natural Language Datasets},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/mmmaurer/elfen}},
}