nltk stemmer: string index out of range

Question

I have a set of pickled text documents which I would like to stem using nltk's PorterStemmer. For reasons specific to my project, I would like to do the stemming inside of a django app view.

However, when stemming the documents inside the django view, I receive an IndexError: string index out of range exception from PorterStemmer().stem() for the string 'oed'. As a result, running the following:

# xkcd_project/search/views.py
from nltk.stem.porter import PorterStemmer

def get_results(request):
    s = PorterStemmer()
    s.stem('oed')
    return render(request, 'list.html')

raises the mentioned error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "//anaconda/envs/xkcd/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/exception.py", line 39, in inner
    response = get_response(request)
  File "//anaconda/envs/xkcd/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 187, in _get_response
    response = self.process_exception_by_middleware(e, request)
  File "//anaconda/envs/xkcd/lib/python2.7/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 185, in _get_response
    response = wrapped_callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)
  File "/Users/jkarimi91/Projects/xkcd_search/xkcd_project/search/views.py", line 15, in get_results
    s.stem('oed')
  File "//anaconda/envs/xkcd/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nltk/stem/porter.py", line 665, in stem
    stem = self._step1b(stem)
  File "//anaconda/envs/xkcd/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nltk/stem/porter.py", line 376, in _step1b
    lambda stem: (self._measure(stem) == 1 and
  File "//anaconda/envs/xkcd/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nltk/stem/porter.py", line 258, in _apply_rule_list
    if suffix == '*d' and self._ends_double_consonant(word):
  File "//anaconda/envs/xkcd/lib/python2.7/site-packages/nltk/stem/porter.py", line 214, in _ends_double_consonant
    word[-1] == word[-2] and
IndexError: string index out of range

Now what is really odd is running the same stemmer on the same string outside django (be it a seperate python file or an interactive python console) produces no error. In other words:

# test.py
from nltk.stem.porter import PorterStemmer
s = PorterStemmer()
print s.stem('oed')

followed by:

python test.py
# successfully prints 'o'

what is causing this issue?

Answer 1

This is an NLTK bug specific to NLTK version 3.2.2, for which I am to blame. It was introduced by PR https://github.com/nltk/nltk/pull/1261 which rewrote the Porter stemmer.

I wrote a fix which went out in NLTK 3.2.3. If you're on version 3.2.2 and want the fix, just upgrade - e.g. by running

pip install -U nltk

Answer 2

I debugged nltk.stem.porter module using pdb. After a few iterations, in _apply_rule_list() you get:

>>> rule
(u'at', u'ate', None)
>>> word
u'o'

At this point the _ends_double_consonant() method tries to do word[-1] == word[-2] and it fails.

If I'm not mistaken, in NLTK 3.2 the relative method was the following:

def _doublec(self, word):
    """doublec(word) is TRUE <=> word ends with a double consonant"""
    if len(word) < 2:
        return False
    if (word[-1] != word[-2]):      
        return False        
    return self._cons(word, len(word)-1)

As far as I can see, the len(word) < 2 check is missing in the new version.

Changing _ends_double_consonant() to something like this should work:

def _ends_double_consonant(self, word):
      """Implements condition *d from the paper

      Returns True if word ends with a double consonant
      """
      if len(word) < 2:
          return False
      return (
          word[-1] == word[-2] and
          self._is_consonant(word, len(word)-1)
      )

I just proposed this change in the related NLTK issue.