How to define semantic hierarchies / relationships when using NLTK?

Question

I want to use NLTK and wordnet to understand the semantic connection between two words. For example, if I find “employee” and “waiter”, he returns something showing that this employee is more general than the waiter. Or for "employee" and "worker" it returns equal. Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

First, you need to solve the problem of getting words in lemmas, and then in Synsets, i.e. how can you identify sync from word?

word => lemma => lemma.pos.sense => synset Waiters => waiter => 'waiter.n.01' => wn.Synset('waiter.n.01') 

So, let's say you are already dealing with the above problem and have reached the highest waiter , then you can continue to compare synsets. Note that a word can have many synsets

 from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn waiter = wn.Synset('waiter.n.01') employee = wn.Synset('employee.n.01') all_hyponyms_of_waiter = list(set([w.replace("_"," ") for s in waiter.closure(lambda s:s.hyponyms()) for w in s.lemma_names])) all_hyponyms_of_employee = list(set([w.replace("_"," ") for s in employee.closure(lambda s:s.hyponyms()) for w in s.lemma_names])) if 'waiter' in all_hyponyms_of_employee: print 'employee more general than waiter' elif 'employee' in all_hyponyms_of_waiter: print 'waiter more general than employee' else: print "The SUMO ontology used in wordnet just doesn't have employee or waiter under the same tree"