python - check if two words are related to each other

Question

I have two lists: one, the interests of the user; and second, the keywords about a book. I want to recommend the book to the user based on his given interests list. I am using the SequenceMatcher class of Python library difflib to match similar words like "game", "games", "gaming", "gamer", etc. The ratio function gives me a number between [0,1] stating how similar the 2 strings are. But I got stuck at one example where I calculated the similarity between "looping" and "shooting". It comes out to be 0.6667.

for interest in self.interests:
    for keyword in keywords:
       s = SequenceMatcher(None,interest,keyword)
       match_freq = s.ratio()
       if match_freq >= self.limit:
            #print interest, keyword, match_freq
            final_score += 1
            break 

Is there any other way to perform this kind of matching in Python?

Answer 1

Firstly a word can have many senses and when you try to find similar words you might need some word sense disambiguation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation.

Given a pair of words, if we take the most similar pair of senses as the gauge of whether two words are similar, we can try this:

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
from itertools import product

wordx, wordy = "cat","dog"
sem1, sem2 = wn.synsets(wordx), wn.synsets(wordy)

maxscore = 0
for i,j in list(product(*[sem1,sem2])):
  score = i.wup_similarity(j) # Wu-Palmer Similarity
  maxscore = score if maxscore < score else maxscore

There are other similarity functions that you can use. http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/howto/wordnet.html. The only problem is when you encounter words not in wordnet. Then i suggest you fallback on difflib.