How do I find the frequency count of a word in English using WordNet?

Question

Is there a way to find the frequency of the usage of a word in the English language using WordNet or NLTK using Python?

NOTE: I do not want the frequency count of a word in a given input file. I want the frequency count of a word in general based on the usage in today's time.

Answer 1

In WordNet, every Lemma has a frequency count that is returned by the method lemma.count(), and which is stored in the file nltk_data/corpora/wordnet/cntlist.rev.

Code example:

from nltk.corpus import wordnet
syns = wordnet.synsets('stack')
for s in syns:
    for l in s.lemmas():
        print l.name + " " + str(l.count())

Result:

stack 2
batch 0
deal 1
flock 1
good_deal 13
great_deal 10
hatful 0
heap 2
lot 13
mass 14
mess 0
...

However, many counts are zero and there is no information in the source file or in the documentation which corpus was used to create this data. According to the book Speech and Language Processing from Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, the sense frequencies come from the SemCor corpus which is a subset of the already small and outdated Brown Corpus.

So it's probably best to choose the corpus that fits best to the your application and create the data yourself as Christopher suggested.

To make this Python3.x compatible just do:

Code example:

from nltk.corpus import wordnet
syns = wordnet.synsets('stack')
for s in syns:
    for l in s.lemmas():
        print( l.name() + " " + str(l.count()))