How to break up a paragraph by sentences in Python

Question

I need to parse sentences from a paragraph in Python. Is there an existing package to do this, or should I be trying to use regex here?

Hammock

Are there double-spaces after the end of each sentence? – Dolorous

Your problem statement doesn't provide sufficient information for us to work with. – Sappy

There are some answers here: #116994 – Snake

"Purely syntactic approaches using regexps sound problematic... just think of the 5.5 ways that Prof. Smith from the U.S. told us periods can be used." – Beograd

These things are usually done by dedicated sentence splitter tools / library modules. Trying to do with regexes alone is not going to produce good results. The better splitters have been trained. – Interdiction

Answer 1

The nltk.tokenize module is designed for this and handles edge cases. For example:

>>> from nltk import tokenize
>>> p = "Good morning Dr. Adams. The patient is waiting for you in room number 3."
>>> tokenize.sent_tokenize(p)
['Good morning Dr. Adams.', 'The patient is waiting for you in room number 3.']

Oneeyed

Answer 2

Here is how I am getting the first n sentences:

def get_first_n_sentence(text, n):
    endsentence = ".?!"
    sentences = itertools.groupby(text, lambda x: any(x.endswith(punct) for punct in endsentence))
    for number,(truth, sentence) in enumerate(sentences):
        if truth:
            first_n_sentences = previous+''.join(sentence).replace('\n',' ')
        previous = ''.join(sentence)
        if number>=2*n: break #

    return first_n_sentences

Reference: http://www.daniweb.com/software-development/python/threads/303844

Hammock

it will not work if the text contains URL's, or something with punctuation (period) on the term like, Ms., Dr., etc. – Chive