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, <
[email protected]>
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/>.
