I have a project wherein I need to extract quotations from a huge set of articles . Here , by quotations I mean things said by people , for eg: Alen said " text to be extracted ." I'm using NLTK for my other NLP related tasks so any solution using NLTK or any kind of Python library would be quite useful.

Thanks

As Mayur mentioned, you can do a regex to pick up everything between quotes

list = re.findall("\".*?\"", string)

The problem you'll run into is that there can be a surprisingly large amount of things between quotation marks that are actually not quotations.

If you're doing academic articles, you can look for a number after the closing quotation to pick up the footnote number. Else with non academic articles, perhaps you could run something like:

"(said|writes|argues|concludes)(,)? \".?\""

can be more precise, but risks losing quotes such as blockquotes (blockquotes will cause you problems anyways because they can include a newline before the closing quotation mark)

As for using NLTK, I can't think of anything there that will be of much help other than perhaps wordnet for finding synonyms for "said".