How to Fix – NameError name ‘stopwords’ is not defined

Stopwords are commonly used words in a language that are usually removed from texts during natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as text classification, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. Examples of stopwords in English include “the”, “and”, “a”, “an”, “in”, “of”, “to”, etc. The NLTK library provides a list of stopwords that you can use in your Python code. It can happen that when you’re trying to use stopwords from the NLTK library, you may run into the “NameError: name ‘stopwords’ is not defined” error.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to fix this error by importing the stopwords module correctly. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a better understanding of how to import stopwords from the NLTK library and avoid common errors.

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

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

How to correctly import stopwords?

The correct way to import the stopwords 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.

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2. Import the nltk module.

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

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

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

Assuming that the nltk module is installed.

import nltk

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

# import stopwords
from nltk.corpus import stopwords

# print the english stopwords
english_stopwords = set(stopwords.words('english'))
print(english_stopwords)

Output:

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

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

{'where', 'myself', 'yourselves', 'aren', "doesn't", 'once', 'do', 'from', 'each', 'have', 'now', 'your', 'doesn', 'into', 'a', "that'll", "shan't", 'then', 'or', "should've", 'she', "didn't", 'them', 'whom', 'in', 'their', 'yourself', 'before', 'up', 'for', 'wouldn', 'yours', 'what', "couldn't", 'during', 'my', 'but', 'i', 'himself', 'did', 'under', 'to', 'more', 'that', 'own', 'there', "hasn't", 'shan', 'the', 'been', "weren't", 'hers', 'is', 'ain', 'and', 'will', 'over', 'its', 'hasn', 'doing', 'theirs', 'below', 'too', "mightn't", 'all', "wasn't", 'he', 'me', 'themselves', 'how', 'only', 'between', 'these', 'should', 'was', "wouldn't", 'which', 'any', "mustn't", 'y', 'mustn', "haven't", 'couldn', 'down', 'they', 'very', 'haven', 'having', "shouldn't", "you're", 'you', 'of', 'am', 'why', 'at', 'other', "needn't", 'd', 'with', "she's", 'about', 'few', 'needn', 'some', 'shouldn', "won't", 'most', 'be', 'same', 'as', 'further', 'an', 'we', 'don', 'those', 'so', 'won', 'until', 'hadn', 'not', 'on', 're', 'both', 'her', 'wasn', "isn't", 'this', 'against', 'ma', 'who', 'off', 'm', "you've", 'ours', 'his', 'can', "aren't", 'didn', "it's", 'ourselves', 'being', 'while', 've', 'isn', 'our', 'weren', "you'd", 'herself', 'nor', 't', 'll', 'him', 'just', "hadn't", "you'll", 'again', 'does', 'mightn', 'it', 'no', 'such', 'are', "don't", 'because', 's', 'through', 'were', 'has', 'itself', 'if', 'than', 'had', 'out', 'after', 'by', 'above', 'here', 'o', 'when'}

In the above example, we are printing the set of English stopwords using the stopwords module from nltk. We followed the steps mentioned earlier and thus didn’t get an error.

Common Errors when importing stopwords

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

NameError: name 'stopwords' is not defined

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

import nltk

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

# print the english stopwords
english_stopwords = set(stopwords.words('english'))
print(english_stopwords)

Output:

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

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

NameError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)

Cell In[2], line 7
      4 nltk.download('stopwords')
      6 # print the english stopwords
----> 7 english_stopwords = set(stopwords.words('english'))
      8 print(english_stopwords)

NameError: name 'stopwords' is not defined

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

LookupError: resource 'stopwords' was not found

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

import nltk

# import stopwords
from nltk.corpus import stopwords

# print the english stopwords
english_stopwords = set(stopwords.words('english'))
print(english_stopwords)

Output:

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

  >>> import nltk
  >>> nltk.download('stopwords')

**********************************************************************

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

Conclusion

In conclusion, the “NameError name ‘stopwords’ 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 the “NameError name ‘stopwords’ is not defined” error and successfully complete your NLP tasks.

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