Counting bigrams (pair of two words) in a file using python

How about zip()?

import re
from collections import Counter
words = re.findall('\w+', open('a.txt').read())
print(Counter(zip(words,words[1:])))

Some itertools magic:

>>> import re
>>> from itertools import islice, izip
>>> words = re.findall("\w+", 
   "the quick person did not realize his speed and the quick person bumped")
>>> print Counter(izip(words, islice(words, 1, None)))

Output:

Counter({('the', 'quick'): 2, ('quick', 'person'): 2, ('person', 'did'): 1, 
  ('did', 'not'): 1, ('not', 'realize'): 1, ('and', 'the'): 1, 
  ('speed', 'and'): 1, ('person', 'bumped'): 1, ('his', 'speed'): 1, 
  ('realize', 'his'): 1})

Bonus

Get the frequency of any n-gram:

from itertools import tee, islice

def ngrams(lst, n):
  tlst = lst
  while True:
    a, b = tee(tlst)
    l = tuple(islice(a, n))
    if len(l) == n:
      yield l
      next(b)
      tlst = b
    else:
      break

>>> Counter(ngrams(words, 3))

Output:

Counter({('the', 'quick', 'person'): 2, ('and', 'the', 'quick'): 1, 
  ('realize', 'his', 'speed'): 1, ('his', 'speed', 'and'): 1, 
  ('person', 'did', 'not'): 1, ('quick', 'person', 'did'): 1, 
  ('quick', 'person', 'bumped'): 1, ('did', 'not', 'realize'): 1, 
  ('speed', 'and', 'the'): 1, ('not', 'realize', 'his'): 1})

This works with lazy iterables and generators too. So you can write a generator which reads a file line by line, generating words, and pass it to ngarms to consume lazily without reading the whole file in memory.

You can simply use Counter for any n_gram like so:

from collections import Counter
from nltk.util import ngrams 

text = "the quick person did not realize his speed and the quick person bumped "
n_gram = 2
Counter(ngrams(text.split(), n_gram))
>>>
Counter({('and', 'the'): 1,
         ('did', 'not'): 1,
         ('his', 'speed'): 1,
         ('not', 'realize'): 1,
         ('person', 'bumped'): 1,
         ('person', 'did'): 1,
         ('quick', 'person'): 2,
         ('realize', 'his'): 1,
         ('speed', 'and'): 1,
         ('the', 'quick'): 2})

For 3-grams, just change the n_gram to 3:

n_gram = 3
Counter(ngrams(text.split(), n_gram))
>>>
Counter({('and', 'the', 'quick'): 1,
         ('did', 'not', 'realize'): 1,
         ('his', 'speed', 'and'): 1,
         ('not', 'realize', 'his'): 1,
         ('person', 'did', 'not'): 1,
         ('quick', 'person', 'bumped'): 1,
         ('quick', 'person', 'did'): 1,
         ('realize', 'his', 'speed'): 1,
         ('speed', 'and', 'the'): 1,
         ('the', 'quick', 'person'): 2})

Starting in Python 3.10, the new pairwise function provides a way to slide through pairs of consecutive elements, such that your use-case simply becomes:

from itertools import pairwise
import re
from collections import Counter

# text = "the quick person did not realize his speed and the quick person bumped "
Counter(pairwise(re.findall('\w+', text)))
# Counter({('the', 'quick'): 2, ('quick', 'person'): 2, ('person', 'did'): 1, ('did', 'not'): 1, ('not', 'realize'): 1, ('realize', 'his'): 1, ('his', 'speed'): 1, ('speed', 'and'): 1, ('and', 'the'): 1, ('person', 'bumped'): 1})

---

Details for intermediate results:

re.findall('\w+', text)
# ['the', 'quick', 'person', 'did', 'not', 'realize', 'his', ...]
pairwise(re.findall('\w+', text))
# [('the', 'quick'), ('quick', 'person'), ('person', 'did'), ...]