12.2.8 Inflection: Pluralization and Singularization

  • Inflections are different forms of the same words, such as singular and plural (like “person” and “people”) and different verb tenses (like “run” and “ran”)
  • When you’re calculating word frequencies, you might first want to convert all inflected words to the same form for more accurate word frequencies
In [1]:
from textblob import Word
In [2]:
index = Word('index')
In [3]:
index.pluralize()
Out[3]:
'indices'
In [4]:
cacti = Word('cacti')
In [5]:
cacti.singularize()
Out[5]:
'cactus'
  • Pluralizing and singularizing are not as simple as adding or removing an “s” or “es” at the end of a word
In [6]:
from textblob import TextBlob
In [7]:
animals = TextBlob('dog cat fish bird').words
In [8]:
animals.pluralize()
Out[8]:
WordList(['dogs', 'cats', 'fish', 'birds'])

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