How to split a list-of-strings into sublists-of-strings by a specific string element

I have a word list like below. I want to split the list by .. Is there any better or useful code in Python 3?

a = ['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat', '.', 'hello', '.', 'she', 'is', 'nice', '.']
result = []
tmp = []
for elm in a:
    if elm is not '.':
        tmp.append(elm)
    else:
        result.append(tmp)
        tmp = []
print(result)
# result: [['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat'], ['hello'], ['she', 'is', 'nice']]

Update

Add test cases to handle it correctly.

a = ['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat', '.', 'hello', '.', 'she', 'is', 'nice', '.']
b = ['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat', '.', 'hello', '.', 'she', 'is', 'nice', '.', 'yes']
c = ['.', 'this', 'is', 'a', 'cat', '.', 'hello', '.', 'she', 'is', 'nice', '.', 'yes']
def split_list(list_data, split_word='.'):
    result = []
    sub_data = []
    for elm in list_data:
        if elm is not split_word:
            sub_data.append(elm)
        else:
            if len(sub_data) != 0:
                result.append(sub_data)
            sub_data = []
    if len(sub_data) != 0:
        result.append(sub_data)
    return result

print(split_list(a)) # [['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat'], ['hello'], ['she', 'is', 'nice']]
print(split_list(b)) # [['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat'], ['hello'], ['she', 'is', 'nice'], ['yes']]
print(split_list(c)) # [['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat'], ['hello'], ['she', 'is', 'nice'], ['yes']]

Using itertools.groupby:

from itertools import groupby
a = ['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat', '.', 'hello', '.', 'she', 'is', 'nice', '.']
result = [
    list(g)
    for k,g in groupby(a,lambda x:x=='.')
    if not k
]
print (result)
#[['this', 'is', 'a', 'cat'], ['hello'], ['she', 'is', 'nice']]