NLTK TypeError: '<' not supported between instances of 'str' and 'int'

Question

I have a piece of code that was working fine a while back.

import nltk
import pickle

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.classify import ClassifierI
from statistics import mode

I have nltk properly installed, and I wasn't getting this problem at all yesterday. To the best of knowledge, nothing has changed.

Here is the complete stack trace,

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\student\Desktop\asd.py", line 1, in <module>
    import nltk
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\nltk\__init__.py", line 128, in <module>
    from nltk.chunk import *
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\nltk\chunk\__init__.py", line 157, in <module>
    from nltk.chunk.api import ChunkParserI
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\nltk\chunk\api.py", line 13, in <module>
    from nltk.parse import ParserI
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\nltk\parse\__init__.py", line 79, in <module>
    from nltk.parse.transitionparser import TransitionParser
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\nltk\parse\transitionparser.py", line 21, in <module>
    from sklearn.datasets import load_svmlight_file
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\sklearn\__init__.py", line 57, in <module>
    from .base import clone
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\sklearn\base.py", line 12, in <module>
    from .utils.fixes import signature
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\sklearn\utils\__init__.py", line 11, in <module>
    from .validation import (as_float_array,
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\sklearn\utils\validation.py", line 18, in <module>
    from ..utils.fixes import signature
  File "C:\Users\student\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36\lib\site-packages\sklearn\utils\fixes.py", line 406, in <module>
    if np_version < (1, 12, 0):
TypeError: '<' not supported between instances of 'str' and 'int'

Answer 1

My best guess is that np_version (the value referenced at the bottom of the stack trace) has become corrupted somehow, and is now a tuple of strings, or some other datatype that is not a tuple of ints, which is what the code is comparing it against in the line if np_version < (1, 12, 0): . I would suggest reinstalling nltk , though that might not be a definite fix. It's possible that a version mismatch has occured in which a newer version uses a tuple of strings to store the version number. If this is so, it might be a good idea to try to install an older version of nltk , though it's possible a reinstall will fix the problem. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Looks like you have somehow ended up with numpy version 1.11.2rc1 . Scikit's fixes.py converts this to the triple (1, 11, '2rc1') , with the inevitable result.

Since the current version is 1.12.1, I think the solution is obvious.