link sentence
August 14, 1996; Richard L. Goerwitz
Requires: co-expressions
This file is in the public domain.
sentence(f) - suspends sentences from file f A lot of grammatical and stylistic analysis programs are predicated on the notion of a sentence. For instance, some programs count the number of words in each sentence. Other count the number and length of clauses. Still others pedantically check for sentence-final par- ticles and prepositions. This procedure, sentence(), is supposed to be used as a filter for ASCII text files, suspending everything that looks remotely like a sentence in them. ____________________________________________________________ BUGS: Cannot correctly parse sentences with constructs like "R. L. Goerwitz" in them. The algorithm can be much improved simply by checking to see if the word after the period is in /usr/dict/words or whatever your system dictionary file is. If it isn't, then it's likely not to be the beginning of a sentence (this also is not in- fallible, naturally).