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/>.

