Understanding NLTK collocation scoring for bigrams and trigrams

Question

Background:

I am trying to compare pairs of words to see which pair is \"more likely to occur\" in US English than another pair. My plan is/was to use

Answer 1

The NLTK collocations document seems pretty good to me. http://www.nltk.org/howto/collocations.html

You need to give the scorer some actual sizable corpus to work with. Here is a working example using the Brown corpus built into NLTK. It takes about 30 seconds to run.

import nltk.collocations
import nltk.corpus
import collections

bgm    = nltk.collocations.BigramAssocMeasures()
finder = nltk.collocations.BigramCollocationFinder.from_words(
    nltk.corpus.brown.words())
scored = finder.score_ngrams( bgm.likelihood_ratio  )

# Group bigrams by first word in bigram.                                        
prefix_keys = collections.defaultdict(list)
for key, scores in scored:
   prefix_keys[key[0]].append((key[1], scores))

# Sort keyed bigrams by strongest association.                                  
for key in prefix_keys:
   prefix_keys[key].sort(key = lambda x: -x[1])

print 'doctor', prefix_keys['doctor'][:5]
print 'baseball', prefix_keys['baseball'][:5]
print 'happy', prefix_keys['happy'][:5]

The output seems reasonable, works well for baseball, less so for doctor and happy.

doctor [('bills', 35.061321987405748), (',', 22.963930079491501), 
  ('annoys', 19.009636692022365), 
  ('had', 16.730384189212423), ('retorted', 15.190847940499127)]

baseball [('game', 32.110754519752291), ('cap', 27.81891372457088), 
  ('park', 23.509042621473505), ('games', 23.105033513054011), 
  ("player's",    16.227872863424668)]

happy [("''", 20.296341424483998), ('Spahn', 13.915820697905589), 
 ('family', 13.734352182441569), 
 (',', 13.55077617193821), ('bodybuilder', 13.513265447290536)