Question

Is there a way (Pattern or Python or NLTK, etc) to detect of a sentence has a list of words in it.

i.e.

The cat ran into the hat, box, and house. | The list would be hat, box, and house

This could be string processed but we may have more generic lists:

i.e.

The cat likes to run outside, run inside, or jump up the stairs. |

List=run outside, run inside, or jump up the stairs.

This could be in the middle of a paragraph or the end of the sentence which further complicates things.

I’ve been working with Pattern for python for awhile and I’m not seeing a way to go about this and was curious if there is a way with pattern or nltk (natural language tool kit).

Answer 1

What about using from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize ?

sent_tokenize("Hello SF Python. This is NLTK.")
["Hello SF Python.", "This is NLTK."]

Then you can use that list of sentences in this way:

for sentence in my_list:
  # test if this sentence contains the words you want
  # using all() method 

More info here