Title: Apache OpenNLP 1.7.0 released

The Apache OpenNLP team is pleased to announce the release of version 1.7.0 of Apache OpenNLP.

The Apache OpenNLP library is a machine learning based toolkit for the processing of natural language text.

It supports the most common NLP tasks, such as tokenization, sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity extraction, chunking, parsing, and coreference resolution.

The OpenNLP 1.7.0 binary and source distributions are available for download from our download page: <http://opennlp.apache.org/cgi-bin/download.cgi>

The OpenNLP library is distributed by Maven Central as well. See the Maven Dependency page for more details: <http://opennlp.apache.org/maven-dependency.html>

This release introduces many new features, improvements and bug fixes. The API has been improved for a better consistency and deprecated methods were removed. Now Java 1.8 and Maven 3.3.9 are required.

Additionally the release contains the following noteworthy changes:

- OpenNLP is up to 50% faster at analyzing content
- A lot of deprecated code has been removed
- Code base has been cleaned up
- There is a new brat annotation service
- Documentation was improved and extended
- A Naive Bayesian Classifier implementation was added
- Morofologik addon is now included
- Added a language model component
- Added a CLI to the lemmatizer component.
- Added a supervised statistical lemmatizer.
- The lemmatizer component API has been entirely rewritten. The changes in
  the previously existing Dictionary-based lemmatizer are not backward compatible.

A detailed list of the issues related to this release can be found in the release
notes.

For a complete list of fixed bugs and improvements please see the RELEASE_NOTES file included in the distribution.

--The Apache OpenNLP Team