Replacing synonyms in a corpus using WordNet and NLTK - python

Question

Trying to write simple python script which will use NLTK to find and replace synonyms in txt file.

Following code gives me error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Nedim\Documents\sinon2.py", line 21, in <module>
    change(word)
  File "C:\Users\Nedim\Documents\sinon2.py", line 4, in change
    synonym = wn.synset(word + ".n.01").lemma_names
TypeError: can only concatenate list (not "str") to list

Here is code:

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn

def change(word):
    synonym = wn.synset(word + ".n.01").lemma_names

    if word in synonym:

            filename = open("C:/Users/tester/Desktop/test.txt").read()
            writeSynonym = filename.replace(str(word), str(synonym[0]))
            f = open("C:/Users/tester/Desktop/test.txt", 'w')
            f.write(writeSynonym)
            f.close()

f = open("C:/Users/tester/Desktop/test.txt")
lines = f.readlines()

for i in range(len(lines)):

    word = lines[i].split()
    change(word)

Answer 1

This isn't terribly efficient, and this would not replace a single synonym. because there could be multiple synonyms for each word. Which you could chose from,

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn
from nltk.corpus.reader.plaintext import PlaintextCorpusReader


corpus_root = 'C://Users//tester//Desktop//'
wordlists = PlaintextCorpusReader(corpus_root, '.*')


for word in wordlists.words('test.txt'):
    synonymList = set()
    wordNetSynset =  wn.synsets(word)
    for synSet in wordNetSynset:
        for synWords in synSet.lemma_names:
            synonymList.add(synWords)
    print synonymList

Answer 2

Two things. First, you can change the file reading portion to:

for line in open("C:/Users/tester/Desktop/test.txt"):
    word = line.split()

And second, .split() returns a list of strings, whereas your change function appears to only operate on a single word at a time. This is what's causing the exception. Your word is actually a list.

If you want to process every word on that line, make it look like:

for line in open("C:/Users/tester/Desktop/test.txt"):
    words = line.split()
    for word in words:
        change(word)