sense-cluster.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Simple algorithm for clustering WordNet synsets. Requires Python 2.5 or 2.6,
# in addition to the NLTK toolkit which is available at http://www.nltk.org/.

import nltk
from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
from nltk.corpus import wordnet_ic

def cluster_senses(word, treshold = 0.30,
                      ic_corpus = wordnet_ic.ic('ic-treebank.dat')):
    """
    """
    synsets = wn.synsets(word, pos=wn.NOUN) # nouns only
    clusters = [[synsets.pop()]]
    for s in synsets:
        added = False
        for c in clusters:
            for ss in c:
                if s.lin_similarity(ss, ic_corpus) > treshold:
                    c.append(s)
                    added = True
                    break
            # Make sure that a synset is only added to one cluster
            if added:
                break
        if not added:
            # the synset doesn't fit in any of the existing clusters so we
            # create a new one
            clusters += [[s]]

    return clusters