title: Remove all articles, connector words, etc., from a string in Python
body: <p>I have a list that contains many sentences.  I want to iterate through the list, removing from all sentences words like "and", "the", "a", "are", etc.  </p>
  
  <p>I tried this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def removearticles(text):
  
  
  articles = {'a': '', 'an':'', 'and':'', 'the':''}
  for i, j in articles.iteritems():
      text = text.replace(i, j)
  return text
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As you can probably tell, however, this will remove "a" and "an" when it appears in the middle of the word.  I need to remove only the instances of the words when they are delimited by blank space, and not when they are within a word.   What is the most efficient way of going about this?</p>