counting n-gram frequency in python nltk

Question

I have the following code. I know that I can use apply_freq_filter function to filter out collocations that are less than a frequency count. However, I don't know how to get the frequencies of all the n-gram tuples (in my case bi-gram) in a document, before I decide what frequency to set for filtering. As you can see I am using the nltk collocations class.

import nltk
from nltk.collocations import *
line = ""
open_file = open('a_text_file','r')
for val in open_file:
    line += val
tokens = line.split()

bigram_measures = nltk.collocations.BigramAssocMeasures()
finder = BigramCollocationFinder.from_words(tokens)
finder.apply_freq_filter(3)
print finder.nbest(bigram_measures.pmi, 100)

Answer 1

NLTK comes with its own bigrams generator, as well as a convenient FreqDist() function.

f = open('a_text_file')
raw = f.read()

tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(raw)

#Create your bigrams
bgs = nltk.bigrams(tokens)

#compute frequency distribution for all the bigrams in the text
fdist = nltk.FreqDist(bgs)
for k,v in fdist.items():
    print k,v

Once you have access to the BiGrams and the frequency distributions, you can filter according to your needs.

Hope that helps.