Natural Language Processing: Python and NLTK

Calculating WordNet Synset similarity

Synsets are organized in a hypernym tree. This tree can be used for reasoning about the similarity between the Synsets it contains. The closer the two Synsets are in the tree, the more similar they are.

How to do it...

If you were to look at all the hyponyms of reference_book (which is the hypernym of cookbook), you'd see that one of them is instruction_book. This seems intuitively very similar to a cookbook, so let's see what WordNet similarity has to say about it with the help of the following code:

>>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet
>>> cb = wordnet.synset('cookbook.n.01')
>>> ib = wordnet.synset('instruction_book.n.01')
>>> cb.wup_similarity(ib)
0.9166666666666666

So they are over 91% similar!

How it works... ...