Assuming wlist is a flat list of words, the is_unique() function could be written as follows:
def is_unique(word, wlist): return wlist.count(word) == 1 I would write the find_max() function like so:
def find_max(conversations_stats): ind_max = conversations_stats.index(conversations_stats[-1]) maxs = max(conversations_stats) return ind_max, maxs