How to find a synonyms in a list of strings using NLTK synsets?

Question

I have a list of strings :

words1 =  ['feds', 'move', 'to', 'require', 'cartocar', 'safety', 'communication']

I want to find a synsets for each of that words using NLTK wordnet synsets. Firstly, I use one string in my list. Here's my codes :

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn

word = ['feds']

data1 = ' '.join(word)

def getSynonyms(data1):
    synonymList1 = []
    wordnetSynset1 = wn.synsets(data1)

    for synset1 in wordnetSynset1:
        for synWords1 in synset1.lemma_names():
            synonymList1.append(synWords1)
    print synonymList1

print "list of synonyms : ", getSynonyms(data1)

and it works. Here's the result :

list of synonyms :  [u'Federal', u'Fed', u'federal_official', u'Federal_Reserve_System', u'Federal_Reserve', u'Fed', u'FRS']

but when I use a list of strings "words1", it doesn't works and the output is none like this >> [].

anyone can help? thanks

Answer 1

You need to pass the words individually and not after joining them.

from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn


def getSynonyms(word1):
        synonymList1 = []
        for data1 in word1:
              wordnetSynset1 = wn.synsets(data1)
              tempList1=[]
              for synset1 in wordnetSynset1:
                 for synWords1 in synset1.lemma_names():
                     tempList1.append(synWords1)
              synonymList1.append(tempList1)
        return synonymList1


word1 =  ['feds', 'move', 'to', 'require', 'cartocar', 'safety', 'communication']
print getSynonyms(word1)