counting n-gram frequency in python nltk

Question

I have the following code. I know that I can use apply_freq_filter function to filter out collocations that are less than a frequency count. However, I don't know how to get the frequencies of all the n-gram tuples (in my case bi-gram) in a document, before I decide what frequency to set for filtering. As you can see I am using the nltk collocations class.

import nltk
from nltk.collocations import *
line = ""
open_file = open('a_text_file','r')
for val in open_file:
    line += val
tokens = line.split()

bigram_measures = nltk.collocations.BigramAssocMeasures()
finder = BigramCollocationFinder.from_words(tokens)
finder.apply_freq_filter(3)
print finder.nbest(bigram_measures.pmi, 100)

Answer 1

The finder.ngram_fd.viewitems() function works