Removing non-English words from text using Python

Question

I am doing a data cleaning exercise on python and the text that I am cleaning contains Italian words which I would like to remove. I have been searching online whether I would be able to do this on Python using a tool kit like nltk.

For example given some text :

"Io andiamo to the beach with my amico."

I would like to be left with :

"to the beach with my" 

Does anyone know of a way as to how this could be done? Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use the words corpus from NLTK:

import nltk
words = set(nltk.corpus.words.words())

sent = "Io andiamo to the beach with my amico."
" ".join(w for w in nltk.wordpunct_tokenize(sent) \
         if w.lower() in words or not w.isalpha())
# 'Io to the beach with my'

Unfortunately, Io happens to be an English word. In general, it may be hard to decide whether a word is English or not.