Your working directory is not correctly set. Log4j is a package used by Malt Parser (see: maltparser-1.7.2/lib/log4j.jar). Which is used for logging logically.
In order to run maltparser in NLTK, the working directory should be set to this folder (in your case: /home/abc/maltparser-1.7.2).
So, step one is getting the latest NLTK from git:
git clone https://github.com/nltk/nltk.git
Install NLTK:
sudo python setup.py install
To run Malt Parser using NLTK try this code example:
import os
import nltk
os.environ['MALTPARSERHOME']="/home/abc/maltparser-1.7.2"
verbose = False
maltParser = nltk.parse.malt.MaltParser(working_dir="/home/abc/maltparser-1.7.2",
mco="engmalt.linear-1.7",
additional_java_args=['-Xmx512m'])
print(maltParser.raw_parse('This is a test sentence', verbose=verbose).tree().pprint())
As you may notice I'm using the pre-learned mco file (engmalt.linear-1.7), which can be downloaded from here:
http://www.maltparser.org/mco/english_parser/engmalt.html
Move this mco file to: /home/abc/maltparser-1.7.2 directory.
Finally NLTK only except malt.jar. So create a copy (or rename):
cp maltparser-1.7.2.jar malt.jar
Which can still be located in your /home/abc/maltparser-1.7.2.jar directory.
Hopefully you'll get it running!