How to Fix – NameError: name ‘inaugural’ is not defined

The Inaugural corpus in the NLTK library in Python is a collection of 55 texts of U.S. presidential inaugural addresses, from George Washington to Donald Trump. These texts are often used as a benchmark for natural language processing tasks such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and language modeling.

The inaugural module provides functions for accessing the Inaugural corpus. It can happen that when you’re trying to use inaugural module from the NLTK library, you may run into the “NameError: name ‘inaugural’ is not defined”.

Why does the NameError: name 'inaugural' is not defined occur?

This error occurs when you try to use the inaugural module from the NLTK library in your Python code, but Python cannot find the inaugural module in its namespace. This could happen if you are not correctly importing the inaugural module.

How to correctly import inaugural?

The correct way to import the inaugural module is as follows –

1. Make sure that you have the nltk module installed. Use pip show nltk inside command prompt or terminal to check if you have the nltk module installed or not. If it is not installed, use pip install nltk inside the command prompt or terminal to install the nltk module.

2. Import the nltk module.

3. Download the inaugural corpus using the nltk module using the command nltk.download('inaugural'). This will download the inaugural corpus to your computer.

4. After downloading the inaugural corpus, you can import the inaugural module in your Python code using from nltk.corpus import inaugural

The above steps will make sure that you have correctly imported inaugural from the nltk module. Let’s now look at an example of importing and using the inaugural module from the nltk library.

Assuming that the nltk module is installed.

import nltk

# download the inaugural corpus
nltk.download('inaugural')

# import inaugural
from nltk.corpus import inaugural

# get a list of all the fileids in the inaugural corpus
fileids = inaugural.fileids()

# get the raw text of the first inaugural address (George Washington, 1789)
raw_text = inaugural.raw(fileids[0])

# print the first 400 characters of the raw text
print(raw_text[:400])

Output:

[nltk_data] Downloading package inaugural to
[nltk_data]     /Users/piyush/nltk_data...
[nltk_data]   Unzipping corpora/inaugural.zip.

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:

Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat 

In the above example, we are loading the text of the first inaugural address of George Washington and printing its first 400 characters using the inaugural corpus from nltk. We followed the steps mentioned earlier and thus didn’t get an error.

Common Errors when importing inaugural

Let’s now look at some common scenarios that could result in errors while importing the inaugural module.

NameError: name 'inaugural' is not defined

A common mistake people do is that they download the inaugural corpus but forget to import it. Like in the example below –

import nltk

# download the inaugural corpus
nltk.download('inaugural')

# get a list of all the fileids in the inaugural corpus
fileids = inaugural.fileids()

# get the raw text of the first inaugural address (George Washington, 1789)
raw_text = inaugural.raw(fileids[0])

# print the first 400 characters of the raw text
print(raw_text[:400])

Output:

[nltk_data] Downloading package inaugural to
[nltk_data]     /Users/piyush/nltk_data...
[nltk_data]   Unzipping corpora/inaugural.zip.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)

Cell In[1], line 7
      4 nltk.download('inaugural')
      6 # get a list of all the fileids in the inaugural corpus
----> 7 fileids = inaugural.fileids()
      9 # get the raw text of the first inaugural address (George Washington, 1789)
     10 raw_text = inaugural.raw(fileids[0])

NameError: name 'inaugural' is not defined

Using nltk.download('inaugural') will download the inaugural corpus to your computer but in order to use it in your Python code, you still have to import the inaugural module. You can import the inaugural module using from nltk.corpus import inaugural.

LookupError: resource 'inaugural' was not found

If the inaugural corpus is not downloaded on your machine and you try to import the inaugural module, it will give you a LookupError.

import nltk

# import inaugural
from nltk.corpus import inaugural

# get a list of all the fileids in the inaugural corpus
fileids = inaugural.fileids()

# get the raw text of the first inaugural address (George Washington, 1789)
raw_text = inaugural.raw(fileids[0])

# print the first 400 characters of the raw text
print(raw_text[:400])

Output:

LookupError: 
**********************************************************************
  Resource inaugural not found.
  Please use the NLTK Downloader to obtain the resource:

  >>> import nltk
  >>> nltk.download('inaugural')
**********************************************************************

To avoid this error, make sure that the inaugural corpus is downloaded before you import it into your code.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the “NameError name ‘inaugural’ is not defined” error can be frustrating when working with natural language processing tasks. However, by following the steps outlined in this tutorial, you can easily fix this error and continue with your NLP project. Remember to import the necessary libraries and modules, and ensure that you have installed the required packages. With these simple fixes, you can overcome this error and successfully complete your NLP tasks.

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