Office products stumble at name and standard street abbreviations as well. 
Floating point numbers however are ignored. Apparently what they are looking 
for is period-space or period-<break of some kind>. Not very comprehensive, but 
of course nothing could accommodate all abbreviations. The example, "I used to 
know H. G. Wells." will produce 3 sentences. But if you ignore a single letter 
followed by a period, then the phrase, “A is greater than B. Therefore, B is 
not greater than A.” will only produce one sentence. 

This evokes in me a severe doubt that the number of sentences can ever be 
absolutely determined with 100% confidence. I suppose had the English language 
been developed in the digital age, someone would have thought of this conundrum 
and used a different character for abbreviations, decimal indicators and 
sentences. 

Things like this make me ponder in what scenario would it be necessary to 
isolate sentences at all. If Microsoft Word, the defacto word processor of the 
world, cannot absolutely detect all sentences in all situations, they obviously 
don’t think there is a real need for it. Can anyone cite an application that 
can detect sentences with 100% certainty? If so, figure out what they are 
using. 

Bob


On Mar 13, 2014, at 02:47 , Fraser Gordon <fraser.gor...@runrev.com> wrote:

> 
> On 13 Mar 2014, at 04:48, Jim Hurley <jhurley0...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> 
>> So I really can't see the purpose of RR's "sentence chunk". I wish they 
>> would explain.
>> 
> 
> We'd be using ICU's sentence breaking code. They include a whole bunch of 
> language-related knowledge with the library and can use that to tell the 
> difference between decimal points, full stops, abbreviations, etc. You're 
> right about it not being perfect but it does seem pretty reliable.
> 
> Regards,
> Fraser
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode@lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription 
> preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode


_______________________________________________
use-livecode mailing list
use-livecode@lists.runrev.com
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription 
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode

Reply via email to