Ekphrasis is a text processing tool, geared towards text from social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook. Ekphrasis performs tokenization, word normalization, word segmentation (for splitting hashtags) and spell correction, using word statistics from 2 big corpora (english Wikipedia, twitter - 330mil english tweets).
If the user does not install ekphrasis using a virtualenv it downloads statistics in /usr/local and requires sudo permissions to run.
Statistics should be downloaded in /home//.ekphrasis to resolve this.