yes, thanks all your tips. I did try sorted with itemgetter. However, the sorted results are same as follows whether I set reverse=True or reverse= False. Isn't it strange? Thanks.
>>> import nltk >>> from nltk.corpus import wordnet as wn >>> pairs = {'car':'automobile', 'gem':'jewel', 'journey':'voyage'} >>> for key in pairs: list_simi=[] from operator import itemgetter word1 = wn.synset(str(key) + '.n.01') word2 = wn.synset(str(pairs[key])+'.n.01') similarity = word1.path_similarity(word2) list_simi.append((key+'-'+pairs[key],similarity)) sorted(list_simi, key=itemgetter(1), reverse=True) [('car-automobile', 1.0)] [('journey-voyage', 0.25)] [('gem-jewel', 0.125)] >>> for key in pairs: list_simi=[] from operator import itemgetter word1 = wn.synset(str(key) + '.n.01') word2 = wn.synset(str(pairs[key])+'.n.01') similarity = word1.path_similarity(word2) list_simi.append((key+'-'+pairs[key],similarity)) sorted(list_simi, key=itemgetter(1), reverse=False) [('car-automobile', 1.0)] [('journey-voyage', 0.25)] [('gem-jewel', 0.125)] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list