NAME
Lingua::Sentence - Perl extension for breaking text paragraphs into sentences
SYNOPSIS
use Lingua::Sentence;
my $splitter = Lingua::Sentence->new("en");
my $text = 'This is a paragraph. It contains several sentences. "But why," you ask?';
print $splitter->split($text);DESCRIPTION
This module allows splitting of text paragraphs into sentences. It is based on scripts developed by Philipp Koehn and Josh Schroeder for processing the Europarl corpus (http://www.statmt.org/europarl/).
The module uses punctuation and capitalization clues to split paragraphs into an newline-separated string with one sentence per line. For example:
This is a paragraph. It contains several sentences. "But why," you ask?goes to:
This is a paragraph.
It contains several sentences.
"But why," you ask?Languages currently supported by the module are:
- Catalan
- Czech
- Dutch
- English
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hungarian
- Icelandic
- Italian
- Latvian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Swedish
Nonbreaking Prefixes Files
Nonbreaking prefixes are loosely defined as any word ending in a period that does NOT indicate an end of sentence marker. A basic example is Mr. and Ms. in English.
The sentence splitter module uses the nonbreaking prefix files included in this distribution.
To add a file for other languages, follow the naming convention nonbreaking_prefix.?? and use the two-letter language code you intend to use when creating a Lingua::Sentence object.
The sentence splitter module will first look for a file for the language it is processing, and fall back to English if a file for that language is not found.
For the splitter, normally a period followed by an uppercase word results in a sentence split. If the word preceeding the period is a nonbreaking prefix, this line break is not inserted.
A special case of prefixes, NUMERIC_ONLY, is included for special cases where the prefix should be handled ONLY when before numbers. For example, "Article No. 24 states this." the No. is a nonbreaking prefix. However, in "No. It is not true." No functions as a word.
See the example prefix files included in the distribution for more examples.
CREDITS
Thanks for the following individuals for supplying nonbreaking prefix files: Bas Rozema (Dutch), Hilário Leal Fontes (Portuguese), Jesús Giménez (Catalan & Spanish), Anne-Kathrin Schumann (Russian)
EXPORT
- new($lang_id)
-
Instantiate an object to split sentences in language $lang_id. If the language is not supported, a splitter object for English will be instantiated.
- new($lang_id,$nonbreaking_prefix_file)
-
Instantiate an object to split sentences in language $lang_id and the nonbreaking prefix file $nonbreaking_prefix_file. If the file does not exist, a splitter object for English will be instantiated.
- split($text)
-
Split sentences in $text by inserting newline characters at the sentence breaks. The resulting string is also terminated with a newline.
- split_array($text)
-
Split sentences in $text into an array of sentences.
SUPPORT
Bugs should always be submitted via the project hosting bug tracker
http://code.google.com/p/corpus-tools/issues/list
For other issues, contact the maintainer.
SEE ALSO
Text::Sentence, Lingua::EN::Sentence, Lingua::DE::Sentence, Lingua::HE::Sentence
AUTHOR
Achim Ruopp, <achimru@gmail.com>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyright (C) 2010 by Digital Silk Road
Portions Copyright (C) 2005 by Philip Koehn and Josh Schroeder (used with permission)
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.