Counting bi-gram frequencies

Question

I've written a piece of code that essentially counts word frequencies and inserts them into an ARFF file for use with weka. I'd like to alter it so that it can count bi-gram frequencies, i.e. pairs of words instead of single words although my attempts have proved unsuccessful at best.

I realise there's alot to look at but any help on this is greatly appreciated. Here's my code:

    import re
    import nltk

    # Quran subset
    filename = raw_input('Enter name of file to convert to ARFF with extension, eg. name.txt: ')

    # create list of lower case words
    word_list = re.split('\s+', file(filename).read().lower())
    print 'Words in text:', len(word_list)
    # punctuation and numbers to be removed
    punctuation = re.compile(r'[-.?!,":;()|0-9]')
    word_list = [punctuation.sub("", word) for word in word_list]

    word_list2 = [w.strip() for w in word_list if w.strip() not in nltk.corpus.stopwords.words('english')]



    # create dictionary of word:frequency pairs
    freq_dic = {}


    for word in word_list2:

        # form dictionary
        try: 
            freq_dic[word] += 1
        except: 
            freq_dic[word] = 1


    print '-'*30

    print "sorted by highest frequency first:"
    # create list of (val, key) tuple pairs
    freq_list2 = [(val, key) for key, val in freq_dic.items()]
    # sort by val or frequency
    freq_list2.sort(reverse=True)
    freq_list3 = list(freq_list2)
    # display result as top 10 most frequent words
    freq_list4 =[]
    freq_list4=freq_list3[:10]

    words = []

    for item in freq_list4:
        a = str(item[1])
        a = a.lower()
        words.append(a)



    f = open(filename)

    newlist = []

    for line in f:
        line = punctuation.sub("", line)
        line = line.lower()
        newlist.append(line)

    f2 = open('Lines.txt','w')

    newlist2= []
    for line in newlist:
        line = line.split()
        newlist2.append(line)
        f2.write(str(line))
        f2.write("\n")


    print newlist2

    # ARFF Creation

    arff = open('output.arff','w')
    arff.write('@RELATION wordfrequency\n\n')
    for word in words:
        arff.write('@ATTRIBUTE ')
        arff.write(str(word))
        arff.write(' numeric\n')

    arff.write('@ATTRIBUTE class {endofworld, notendofworld}\n\n')
    arff.write('@DATA\n')
    # Counting word frequencies for each verse
    for line in newlist2:
        word_occurrences = str("")
        for word in words:
            matches = int(0)
            for item in line:
                if str(item) == str(word):
                matches = matches + int(1)
                else:
                continue
            word_occurrences = word_occurrences + str(matches) + ","
        word_occurrences = word_occurrences + "endofworld"
        arff.write(word_occurrences)
        arff.write("\n")

    print words

Answer 1

This should get you started:

def bigrams(words):
    wprev = None
    for w in words:
        yield (wprev, w)
        wprev = w

Note that the first bigram is (None, w1) where w1 is the first word, so you have a special bigram that marks start-of-text. If you also want an end-of-text bigram, add yield (wprev, None) after the loop.