General case synonym matching using nltk.

Synonym_checker

from nltk.corpus import wordnet
from nltk.stem.wordnet import WordNetLemmatizer
import itertools


def Synonym_Checker(word1, word2):
    """Checks if word1 and word2 and synonyms. Returns True if they are, otherwise False"""

    equivalence = WordNetLemmatizer()
    word1 = equivalence.lemmatize(word1)
    word2 = equivalence.lemmatize(word2)

    word1_synonyms = wordnet.synsets(word1)
    word2_synonyms = wordnet.synsets(word2)

    scores = [i.wup_similarity(j) for i, j in list(itertools.product(word1_synonyms, word2_synonyms))]
    max_index = scores.index(max(scores))
    best_match = (max_index/len(word1_synonyms), max_index % len(word1_synonyms)-1)

    word1_set = word1_synonyms[best_match[0]].lemma_names
    word2_set = word2_synonyms[best_match[1]].lemma_names
    match = False
    match = [match or word in word2_set for word in word1_set][0]

    return match

print Synonym_Checker("tomato", "Lycopersicon_esculentum")

word1_set = word1_synonyms[best_match[0]].lemma_names should be word1_set = word1_synonyms[best_match[0]].lemma_names() Notice the parens at the end ()

best_match should contain integers but often it contains floats so the code fails when you call word1_synonyms[best_match[0]] or word2_synonyms[best_match[0]].

When I run this code I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/shanika//Lemmatizer.py", line 76, in <module>
    print Synonym_Checker("tomato", "Lycopersicon_esculentum")
  File "/home/shanika/Lemmatizer.py", line 72, in Synonym_Checker
    match = [match or word in word2_set for word in word1_set][0]
TypeError: 'instancemethod' object is not iterable

Change
word1_set = word1_synonyms[best_match[0]].lemma_names
word2_set = word2_synonyms[best_match[1]].lemma_names
To
word1_set = word1_synonyms[int(best_match[0])].lemma_names()
word2_set = word2_synonyms[int(best_match[1])].lemma_names()