I am working with a CountVectorizer from scikit learn, and I'm possibly attempting to do some things that the object was not made for...but I'm not sure.

In terms of getting counts for occurrence:

vocabulary = ['hi', 'bye', 'run away!']
corpus = ['run away!']
cv = CountVectorizer(vocabulary=vocabulary)
X = cv.fit_transform(corpus)
print X.toarray()

gives:

[[0 0 0 0]]

What I'm realizing is that the CountVectorizer will break the corpus into what I believe is unigrams:

vocabulary = ['hi', 'bye', 'run']
corpus = ['run away!']
cv = CountVectorizer(vocabulary=vocabulary)
X = cv.fit_transform(corpus)
print X.toarray()

which gives:

[[0 0 1]]

Is there any way to tell the CountVectorizer exactly how you'd like to vectorize the corpus? Ideally I would like an outcome along the lines of the first example.

In all honestly, however, I'm wondering if it is at all possible to get an outcome along these lines:

vocabulary = ['hi', 'bye', 'run away!']
corpus = ['I want to run away!']
cv = CountVectorizer(vocabulary=vocabulary)
X = cv.fit_transform(corpus)
print X.toarray()[[0 0 1]]

I don't see much information in the documentation for the fit_transform method, which only takes one argument as it is. If anyone has any ideas I would be grateful. Thanks!

The parameter you want is called ngram_range. You pass in a tuple (1,2) to the constructor to get unigrams and bigrams. However, the vocabulary you pass in needs to be a dict with ngrams as keys and integers as values.

In [20]: print CountVectorizer(vocabulary={'hi': 0, u'bye': 1, u'run away': 2}, ngram_range=(1,2)).fit_transform(['I want to run away!']).A
[[0 0 1]]

Note the default tokeniser removes the exclamation mark at the end, so the last token is away. If you want more control over how the string is broken up into tokens, follow @BrenBarn's comment.