How to edit NLTKs VADER sentiment lexicon without modifying a txt file

Question

I know you can add your own words by manually adding them to the vader_lexicon.txt file. I was wondering if there was another way that you can do it in the python code as I don't want people who use my code need to then go modify other .txt files.

from nltk.sentiment.vader import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer as SIA

sia = SIA()
sia.lexicon

This will get the dict. Was thinking something like:

sia.lexicon.update{u'word': 3}

Fathead

Answer 1

For anyone else:

from nltk.sentiment.vader import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer

new_words = {
    'foo': 2.0,
    'bar': -3.4,
}

SIA = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()

SIA.lexicon.update(new_words)

Invent

Answer 2

I think this is the answer.

 sia.lexicon.update({u'word': 3.1})

Fathead