How to use NLTK WordNet to check for incomplete words in Python?

Question

I have a set of words:

{corporal, dog, cat, distingus, Company, phone, authority, vhicule, seats, lightweight, rules, resident, expertise}

I want to compute the sematic similarity between every word in the previous set. I have one problem:

1. Some of the words are not complete as "vhicule". How can I ignore these words?

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Sample code: Python: Passing variables into Wordnet Synsets methods in NLTK

import nltk.corpus as corpus
import itertools as IT
import fileinput

if __name__=="__main__":
    wordnet = corpus.wordnet
    list1 = ["apple", "honey", "drinks", "flowers", "paper"]
    list2 = ["pear", "shell", "movie", "fire", "tree"]

    for word1, word2 in IT.product(list1, list2):
        #print(word1, word2)
        wordFromList1 = wordnet.synsets(word1)[0]
        wordFromList2 = wordnet.synsets(word2)[0]
        print('{w1}, {w2}: {s}'.format(
            w1 = wordFromList1.name,
            w2 = wordFromList2.name,
            s = wordFromList1.wup_similarity(wordFromList2)))

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Suppose that I add "vhicule" to the any of the lists. I get the following error:

IndexError: List index out of range.

How can I use this error to ignore the words that doesn't exist in the database?

Answer 1

You can check whether nltk.corpus.wordnet.synsets(i) returns a list of synsets:

>>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
>>> x = [i.strip() for i in """corporal, dog, cat, distingus, Company, phone, authority, vhicule, seats, lightweight, rules, resident, expertise""".lower().split(",")]
>>> x
['corporal', 'dog', 'cat', 'distingus', 'company', 'phone', 'authority', 'vhicule', 'seats', 'lightweight', 'rules', 'resident', 'expertise']
>>> y = [i for i in x if len(wn.synsets(i)) > 0]
>>> y
['corporal', 'dog', 'cat', 'company', 'phone', 'authority', 'seats', 'lightweight', 'rules', 'resident', 'expertise']

And an even less verbose way is to check whether wn.synsets(i) are None:

>>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
>>> x = [i.strip() for i in """corporal, dog, cat, distingus, Company, phone, authority, vhicule, seats, lightweight, rules, resident, expertise""".lower().split(",")]
>>> x
['corporal', 'dog', 'cat', 'distingus', 'company', 'phone', 'authority', 'vhicule', 'seats', 'lightweight', 'rules', 'resident', 'expertise']
>>> [i for i in x if wn.synsets(i)]
['corporal', 'dog', 'cat', 'company', 'phone', 'authority', 'seats', 'lightweight', 'rules', 'resident', 'expertise']