The segtok package provides two modules, segtok.segmenter and segtok.tokenizer. The segmenter provides functionality for splitting (Indo-European) text into sentences. The tokenizer provides functionality for splitting (Indo-European) sentences into words and symbols (collectively called tokens). Both modules can also be used from the command-line. While other Indo-European languages could work, it has only been designed with languages such as Spanish, English, and German in mind. For a more informed introduction to this tool, please read the article on my blog.

To install this package, you should have the latest official version of Python 2 or 3 installed. The package has been reported to work with Python 2.7, 3.3, and 3.4 and is tested against the latest Python 2 and 3 branches. The easiest way to get it installed is using pip or any other package manager that works with PyPI:

pip install segtok

Important: If you are on a Linux machine and have problems installing the regex dependency of segtok, make sure you have the python-dev and/or python3-dev packages installed to get the necessary headers to compile the package.

Then try the command line tools on some plain-text files (e.g., this README) to see if segtok meets your needs:

segmenter README.rst | tokenizer

For details, please refer to the respective documentation; This README only provides an overview of the provided functionality.

After installing the package, two command-line tools will be available, segmenter and tokenizer. Each can take UTF-8 encoded plain-text and transforms it into newline-separated sentences or tokens, respectively. You can use other encoding in Python3 simply by reconfiguring your environment encoding or in any version of Python by forcing a particular encoding with the --encoding parameters. The tokenizer assumes that each line contains (at most) one single sentence, which is the output format of the segmenter. To learn more about each tool, please invoke them with their help option (-h or --help).

This module provides several split_... functions to segment texts into lists of sentences. In addition, to_unix_linebreaks normalizes linebreaks (including the Unicode linebreak) to newline control characters (\\n). The function rewrite_line_separators can be used to move (rewrite) the newline separators in the input text so that they are placed at the sentence segmentation locations.

This module provides several ..._tokenizer functions to tokenize input sentences into words and symbols. In addition, it provides convenience functionality for English texts: Two compiled patterns (IS_...) can be used to detect if a word token contains a possessive-s marker ("Frank's") or is an apostrophe-based contraction ("didn't"). Tokens that match these patterns can then be split using the split_possessive_markers and split_contractions functions, respectively.

License: MIT

Copyright (c) 2014, Florian Leitner. All rights reserved.

Contributors (kudos):

• Mikhail Korobov (@kmike; port to Python2.7 and Travis CI integration)

• 1.5.1 removed count_continuations.py discussion from README (was only confusing); the segmenter now can preserve tab-separated text IDs before the text itself when reading from STDIN and then inserts a (tab-separated) sentence ID column for each sentence printed to STDOUT: see segmenter option --with-ids
• 1.5.0 continuation words have been statistically evaluated and some poor choices removed (leading to more [precise] sentence splitting; see issue #9 by @Klim314 on GitHub)
• 1.4.0 the word_tokenizer no longer splits on colons between digits (time, references, ...)
• 1.3.1 fixed multiple dangling commas and colons (reported by Jim Geovedi)
• 1.3.0 added Python2.7 support and Travis CI test integration (BIG thanks to Mikhail!)
• 1.2.2 made segtok.tokenizer.match protected (renamed to "_match") and fixed UNIX linebreak normalization
• 1.2.1 the length of sentences inside brackets is now parametrized
• 1.2.0 wrote blog "documentation" and added chemical formula sub/super-script functionality
• 1.1.2 fixed Unicode list of valid sentence terminals (was missing U+2048)
• 1.1.1 fixed PyPI setup (missing MANIFEST.in for README.rst and "packages" in setup.py)
• 1.1.0 added possessive-s marker and apostrophe contraction splitting of tokens
• 1.0.0 initial release