title: wordet synset in python
body: <p>I am using <code>wordnet.synset()</code> function in my code</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; cb = wordnet.synset('fever.n.01')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; cb
  Synset('fever.n.01')
  
  &gt;&gt;&gt; cb = wordnet.synset('disbelieve.n.01')
  
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;pyshell#60&gt;", line 3, in &lt;module&gt;
      cb = wordnet.synset('disbelieve.n.01')
    File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\nltk\corpus\reader\wordnet.py", line 1016, in synset
      raise WordNetError(message % (lemma, pos))
  WordNetError: no lemma 'disbelieve' with part of speech 'n'
  
  &gt;&gt;&gt; cb = wordnet.synset('disbelieve.v.01')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; cb
  Synset('disbelieve.v.01')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>'disbelieve.v.01' exists in wordnet. But the nltk.pos_tag tags it as noun.</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import nltk
  &gt;&gt;&gt; tagged = nltk.pos_tag('disbelieve')
  &gt;&gt;&gt; tagged
  [('disbelieve', 'NN')]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Going forward I will be using wordnet's synset similarity function. I do not want to check for pos tags as there is a fair chance of above mentioned error.</p>
  
  <p>So I would want to know if there is any function in nltk that checks if a word beginning with(say, 'disbelieve') exists in wordnet then get the complete wordnet stored form of the word(i.e. 'disbelieve.v.01')</p>