In the docs for advanced noun phrase chunkers, ConllExtractor is called on a string, like this:

from textblob.np_extractors import ConllExtractor
extractor = ConllExtractor()
blob = TextBlob("Python is a high-level programming language.", np_extractor=extractor)

However, on Python 2.7, calling blob.noun_phrases on this object raises an exception. The underlying issue is that ConllExtractor depends on the PatternTagger.tag() method, which throws an AttributeError when given a str, as illustrated in this minimal example:

from textblob.taggers import PatternTagger
PatternTagger().tag('hi')

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 2, in <module>
    PatternTagger().tag('hi')
  File "/home/jschnurr/.virtualenvs/btest/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/textblob/en/taggers.py", line 23, in tag
    text = text.raw
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'raw'   

Specifying Unicode works properly:

from textblob.taggers import PatternTagger
PatternTagger().tag(u'hi')

[(u'hi', u'UH')]