check if two words are related to each other

Question

I have two lists: one, the interests of the user; and second, the keywords about a book. I want to recommend the book to the user based on his given interests list. I am usi

Answer 1

At first, I thought to regular expressions to perform additional tests to discriminate the matchings with low ratio. It can be a solution to treat specific problem like the one happening with words ending with ing. But that's only a limited case and thre can be numerous other cases that would need to add specific treatment for each one.

Then I thought that we could try to find additional criterium to eliminate not semantically matching words having a letters simlarity ratio enough to be detected as matcging together though the ratio is low,
WHILE in the same time catching real semantically matching terms having low ratio because they are short.

Here's a possibility

from difflib import SequenceMatcher

interests = ('shooting','gaming','looping')
keywords = ('loop','looping','game')

s = SequenceMatcher(None)

limit = 0.50

for interest in interests:
    s.set_seq2(interest)
    for keyword in keywords:
        s.set_seq1(keyword)
        b = s.ratio()>=limit and len(s.get_matching_blocks())==2
        print '%10s %-10s  %f  %s' % (interest, keyword,
                                      s.ratio(),
                                      '** MATCH **' if b else '')
    print

gives

  shooting loop        0.333333  
  shooting looping     0.666667  
  shooting game        0.166667  

    gaming loop        0.000000  
    gaming looping     0.461538  
    gaming game        0.600000  ** MATCH **

   looping loop        0.727273  ** MATCH **
   looping looping     1.000000  ** MATCH **
   looping game        0.181818  

Note this from the doc:

SequenceMatcher computes and caches detailed information about the second sequence, so if you want to compare one sequence against many sequences, use set_seq2() to set the commonly used sequence once and call set_seq1() repeatedly, once for each of the other sequences.