Any way to avoid the download every time?

[Michael]

I'm writing an anagram solver, and using this to help pull different versions of words in the dictionary like "weakened" vs. "weaken" - "weaken" is in the dictionary file I'm using, but "weakened" is not because it's a different form of the base word.

Every time I run my program, there's a 7 or so second delay while word_forms downloads files and sets things up - is there any way to just have it use the files it downloaded last time?

[Michael]

It looks like maybe the delay is in the setup of nltk and the wordnet? What's it doing, exactly? Why does it take so long on each run?

[Dibya Chakravorty]

Word forms requires a few seconds startup time because of the following lines in https://github.com/gutfeeling/word_forms/blob/master/word_forms/constants.py

ALL_WORDNET_WORDS = set()
for synset in list(wn.all_synsets()):
    for lemma in synset.lemmas():
        ALL_WORDNET_WORDS.add(lemma.name())

If you want to avoid the startup time, consider computing ALL_WORDNET_WORDS and persisting it in a file.

[Michael]

Thank you - that reduced startup time from 15 seconds to 5. Is there some reason this isn't done by default? I imagine a method for re-downloading and re-generating the file wouldn't be too much of a hassle, but using a local one by default seems like a more user-friendly approach given that it's only about 1.8 megs.

I guess I could write something and submit it for pull request, but I'm kinda new to contributing.

[Dibya Chakravorty]

Good point. Yes, if you want, send me a pull request. No worries about being new to contributing.