Midterm

Ground rules

This is a “take-home” midterm, because I don’t want to add unnecessary anxiety, or run into technical trouble that causes things to get delayed in what would be a short time to take an in-class midterm.

However, it is still of course important that you do this on your own. What that means specifically is not consulting with classmates, roommates, etc. I do not plan for this to be difficult. If you (feel that you) have been doing relatively well on understanding the homework, then these things should not be particularly challenging. If you are having technical trouble, please let me know, and I will try to help you troubleshoot.

One thing you are hereby explicitly allowed to do, however, is consult static online reference sources. So, looking things up in the book, in the detailed documentation on python.org, nltk.org, StackExchange, etc., is fine. That is, after all, how you would proceed in the real world if you have a problem you want to solve. If you have questions, you can ask me.

I don’t think there will be much cause to worry about the ground rules, but I still wanted to state them. I expect this to take not (much?) more than the time it would have taken to do this in class time.

Task 1

Define a function called non_five_odds that will take an integer n as an argument, and return a list of all the odd numbers between 0 and n except 5.

Notes:

• “Between” means “between”; 7 is not between 0 and 7. 7 is between 0 and 8.
• “…integer n” here means that you are not responsible for how non_five_odds(10.5) behaves. It does not need to reject 10.5 as being a non-integer, but it does not matter what the function returns in that case.
• non_five_odds(10) should return [1, 3, 7, 9].
• You can accomplish this however you want. There are several possible approaches to this.
• If you divide one number by another, the result is a float (floating point number, a number with a decimal point), not an integer. (Some of the possible approaches require dividing.)
• It is nearly certain that range() will be useful, but note that the number you provide to range() must be an integer.
• You can use int() to convert a float to an integer (the integer toward 0): int(29/10) == 2.

Task 2

Use Python to count how many different words in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” contain the sequence hat.

Notes / assumptions:

• “hat” is one word, no matter how many times it occurs.
• “hat” and “Hat” are not different words.

Task 3

Use Python to create a list containing any sentences in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in which the actual word “hat” appears, and provide the resulting list.

Notes:

• “what” or “hate” or “hatter” are not the actual word “hat”. Only “hat” is.
• the list containing sentences should contain text strings, rather than containing lists of words. Something like ['I have a hat .', 'You have a hat .'] and not [['I', 'have', 'a', 'hat', '.'],['You', 'have', 'a', 'hat', '.']]
• I was a bit surprised by the answer I got. If you find the answer surprising, it might nevertheless still be correct.

Task 4

Use WordNet to provide the senses of the word “hat”, the definition of each, hypernyms of each, and examples of each.

Notes:

• You can do this in several steps. That is, first find the different meanings/senses that “hat” can have, then go through the list of meanings and find the definition, then go through the list and find the hypernyms, etc.
• By “definition” I mean just the one that is already in the WordNet corpus for each sense.
• Not all of the senses have examples within WordNet. Make up one of your own if there isn’t one for any given sense, based on the definition and hypernyms you found for that sense.
• I found some of this surprising too. Who knew there was so much left to be surprised about in the domain of hats?