How to get rid of punctuation using NLTK tokenizer

问题:

I'm just starting to use NLTK and I don't quite understand how to get a list of words from text. If I use nltk.word_tokenize(), I get a list of words and punctuation. I need only the words instead. How can I get rid of punctuation? Also word_tokenize doesn't work with multiple sentences: dots are added to the last word.

回答1:

Take a look at the other tokenizing options that nltk provides here. For example, you can define a tokenizer that picks out sequences of alphanumeric characters as tokens and drops everything else:

from nltk.tokenize import RegexpTokenizer

tokenizer = RegexpTokenizer(r'\w+')
tokenizer.tokenize('Eighty-seven miles to go, yet.  Onward!')

Output:

['Eighty', 'seven', 'miles', 'to', 'go', 'yet', 'Onward']

回答2:

You do not really need NLTK to remove punctuation. You can remove it with simple python. For strings:

import string
s = '... some string with punctuation ...'
s = s.translate(None, string.punctuation)

Or for unicode:

import string
translate_table = dict((ord(char), None) for char in string.punctuation)   
s.translate(translate_table)

and then use this string in your tokenizer.

P.S. string module have some other sets of elements that can be removed (like digits).

回答3:

As noticed in comments start with sent_tokenize(), because word_tokenize() works only on a single sentence. You can filter out punctuation with filter(). And if you have an unicode strings make sure that is a unicode object (not a 'str' encoded with some encoding like 'utf-8').

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize, sent_tokenize

text = '''It is a blue, small, and extraordinary ball. Like no other'''
tokens = [word for sent in sent_tokenize(text) for word in word_tokenize(sent)]
print filter(lambda word: word not in ',-', tokens)

回答4:

Below code will remove all punctuation marks as well as non alphabetic characters. Copied from their book.

http://www.nltk.org/book/ch01.html

import nltk

s = "I can't do this now, because I'm so tired.  Please give me some time. @ sd  4 232"

words = nltk.word_tokenize(s)

words=[word.lower() for word in words if word.isalpha()]

print(words)

output

['i', 'ca', 'do', 'this', 'now', 'because', 'i', 'so', 'tired', 'please', 'give', 'me', 'some', 'time', 'sd']

回答5:

I just used the following code, which removed all the punctuation:

tokens = nltk.wordpunct_tokenize(raw)

type(tokens)

text = nltk.Text(tokens)

type(text)  

words = [w.lower() for w in text if w.isalpha()]

回答6:

I think you need some sort of regular expression matching (the following code is in Python 3):

import string
import re
import nltk

s = "I can't do this now, because I'm so tired.  Please give me some time."
l = nltk.word_tokenize(s)
ll = [x for x in l if not re.fullmatch('[' + string.punctuation + ']+', x)]
print(l)
print(ll)

Output:

['I', 'ca', "n't", 'do', 'this', 'now', ',', 'because', 'I', "'m", 'so', 'tired', '.', 'Please', 'give', 'me', 'some', 'time', '.']
['I', 'ca', "n't", 'do', 'this', 'now', 'because', 'I', "'m", 'so', 'tired', 'Please', 'give', 'me', 'some', 'time']

Should work well in most cases since it removes punctuation while preserving tokens like "n't", which can't be obtained from regex tokenizers such as wordpunct_tokenize.

回答7:

I use this code to remove punctuation:

import nltk
def getTerms(sentences):
    tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(sentences)
    words = [w.lower() for w in tokens if w.isalnum()]
    print tokens
    print words

getTerms("hh, hh3h. wo shi 2 4 A . fdffdf. A&&B ")

And If you want to check whether a token is a valid English word or not, you may need PyEnchant

Tutorial:

 import enchant
 d = enchant.Dict("en_US")
 d.check("Hello")
 d.check("Helo")
 d.suggest("Helo")

回答8:

Remove punctuaion(It will remove . as well as part of punctuation handling using below code)

        tbl = dict.fromkeys(i for i in range(sys.maxunicode) if unicodedata.category(chr(i)).startswith('P'))
        text_string = text_string.translate(tbl) #text_string don't have punctuation
        w = word_tokenize(text_string)  #now tokenize the string 

Sample Input/Output:

direct flat in oberoi esquire. 3 bhk 2195 saleable 1330 carpet. rate of 14500 final plus 1% floor rise. tax approx 9% only. flat cost with parking 3.89 cr plus taxes plus possession charger. middle floor. north door. arey and oberoi woods facing. 53% paymemt due. 1% transfer charge with buyer. total cost around 4.20 cr approx plus possession charges. rahul soni

['direct', 'flat', 'oberoi', 'esquire', '3', 'bhk', '2195', 'saleable', '1330', 'carpet', 'rate', '14500', 'final', 'plus', '1', 'floor', 'rise', 'tax', 'approx', '9', 'flat', 'cost', 'parking', '389', 'cr', 'plus', 'taxes', 'plus', 'possession', 'charger', 'middle', 'floor', 'north', 'door', 'arey', 'oberoi', 'woods', 'facing', '53', 'paymemt', 'due', '1', 'transfer', 'charge', 'buyer', 'total', 'cost', 'around', '420', 'cr', 'approx', 'plus', 'possession', 'charges', 'rahul', 'soni']