How can I split a text into sentences?

I have a text file. I need to get a list of sentences.

How can this be implemented? There are a lot of subtleties, such as a dot being used in abbreviations.

My old regular expression works badly:

re.compile('(\. |^|!|\?)([A-Z][^;↑\.<>@\^&/\[\]]*(\.|!|\?) )',re.M)

The Natural Language Toolkit (nltk.org) has what you need. This group posting indicates this does it:

import nltk.data

tokenizer = nltk.data.load('tokenizers/punkt/english.pickle')
fp = open("test.txt")
data = fp.read()
print '\n-----\n'.join(tokenizer.tokenize(data))

(I haven't tried it!)

This function can split the entire text of Huckleberry Finn into sentences in about 0.1 seconds and handles many of the more painful edge cases that make sentence parsing non-trivial e.g. "Mr. John Johnson Jr. was born in the U.S.A but earned his Ph.D. in Israel before joining Nike Inc. as an engineer. He also worked at craigslist.org as a business analyst."

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import re
alphabets= "([A-Za-z])"
prefixes = "(Mr|St|Mrs|Ms|Dr)[.]"
suffixes = "(Inc|Ltd|Jr|Sr|Co)"
starters = "(Mr|Mrs|Ms|Dr|He\s|She\s|It\s|They\s|Their\s|Our\s|We\s|But\s|However\s|That\s|This\s|Wherever)"
acronyms = "([A-Z][.][A-Z][.](?:[A-Z][.])?)"
websites = "[.](com|net|org|io|gov)"

def split_into_sentences(text):
    text = " " + text + "  "
    text = text.replace("\n"," ")
    text = re.sub(prefixes,"\\1<prd>",text)
    text = re.sub(websites,"<prd>\\1",text)
    if "Ph.D" in text: text = text.replace("Ph.D.","Ph<prd>D<prd>")
    text = re.sub("\s" + alphabets + "[.] "," \\1<prd> ",text)
    text = re.sub(acronyms+" "+starters,"\\1<stop> \\2",text)
    text = re.sub(alphabets + "[.]" + alphabets + "[.]" + alphabets + "[.]","\\1<prd>\\2<prd>\\3<prd>",text)
    text = re.sub(alphabets + "[.]" + alphabets + "[.]","\\1<prd>\\2<prd>",text)
    text = re.sub(" "+suffixes+"[.] "+starters," \\1<stop> \\2",text)
    text = re.sub(" "+suffixes+"[.]"," \\1<prd>",text)
    text = re.sub(" " + alphabets + "[.]"," \\1<prd>",text)
    if "”" in text: text = text.replace(".”","”.")
    if "\"" in text: text = text.replace(".\"","\".")
    if "!" in text: text = text.replace("!\"","\"!")
    if "?" in text: text = text.replace("?\"","\"?")
    text = text.replace(".",".<stop>")
    text = text.replace("?","?<stop>")
    text = text.replace("!","!<stop>")
    text = text.replace("<prd>",".")
    sentences = text.split("<stop>")
    sentences = sentences[:-1]
    sentences = [s.strip() for s in sentences]
    return sentences

Instead of using regex for spliting the text into sentences, you can also use nltk library.

>>> 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.']

ref: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9474645/2877052

You can try using Spacy instead of regex. I use it and it does the job.

import spacy
nlp = spacy.load('en')

text = '''Your text here'''
tokens = nlp(text)

for sent in tokens.sents:
    print(sent.string.strip())

Here is a middle of the road approach that doesn't rely on any external libraries. I use list comprehension to exclude overlaps between abbreviations and terminators as well as to exclude overlaps between variations on terminations, for example: '.' vs. '."'

abbreviations = {'dr.': 'doctor', 'mr.': 'mister', 'bro.': 'brother', 'bro': 'brother', 'mrs.': 'mistress', 'ms.': 'miss', 'jr.': 'junior', 'sr.': 'senior',
                 'i.e.': 'for example', 'e.g.': 'for example', 'vs.': 'versus'}
terminators = ['.', '!', '?']
wrappers = ['"', "'", ')', ']', '}']


def find_sentences(paragraph):
   end = True
   sentences = []
   while end > -1:
       end = find_sentence_end(paragraph)
       if end > -1:
           sentences.append(paragraph[end:].strip())
           paragraph = paragraph[:end]
   sentences.append(paragraph)
   sentences.reverse()
   return sentences


def find_sentence_end(paragraph):
    [possible_endings, contraction_locations] = [[], []]
    contractions = abbreviations.keys()
    sentence_terminators = terminators + [terminator + wrapper for wrapper in wrappers for terminator in terminators]
    for sentence_terminator in sentence_terminators:
        t_indices = list(find_all(paragraph, sentence_terminator))
        possible_endings.extend(([] if not len(t_indices) else [[i, len(sentence_terminator)] for i in t_indices]))
    for contraction in contractions:
        c_indices = list(find_all(paragraph, contraction))
        contraction_locations.extend(([] if not len(c_indices) else [i + len(contraction) for i in c_indices]))
    possible_endings = [pe for pe in possible_endings if pe[0] + pe[1] not in contraction_locations]
    if len(paragraph) in [pe[0] + pe[1] for pe in possible_endings]:
        max_end_start = max([pe[0] for pe in possible_endings])
        possible_endings = [pe for pe in possible_endings if pe[0] != max_end_start]
    possible_endings = [pe[0] + pe[1] for pe in possible_endings if sum(pe) > len(paragraph) or (sum(pe) < len(paragraph) and paragraph[sum(pe)] == ' ')]
    end = (-1 if not len(possible_endings) else max(possible_endings))
    return end


def find_all(a_str, sub):
    start = 0
    while True:
        start = a_str.find(sub, start)
        if start == -1:
            return
        yield start
        start += len(sub)

I used Karl's find_all function from this entry: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4664850/find-all-occurrences-of-a-substring-in-python

For simple cases (where sentences are terminated normally), this should work:

import re
text = ''.join(open('somefile.txt').readlines())
sentences = re.split(r' *[\.\?!][\'"\)\]]* *', text)

The regex is *\. +, which matches a period surrounded by 0 or more spaces to the left and 1 or more to the right (to prevent something like the period in re.split being counted as a change in sentence).

Obviously, not the most robust solution, but it'll do fine in most cases. The only case this won't cover is abbreviations (perhaps run through the list of sentences and check that each string in sentences starts with a capital letter?)

You can also use sentence tokenization function in NLTK:

from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize
sentence = "As the most quoted English writer Shakespeare has more than his share of famous quotes.  Some Shakespare famous quotes are known for their beauty, some for their everyday truths and some for their wisdom. We often talk about Shakespeare’s quotes as things the wise Bard is saying to us but, we should remember that some of his wisest words are spoken by his biggest fools. For example, both ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be,’ and ‘to thine own self be true’ are from the foolish, garrulous and quite disreputable Polonius in Hamlet."

sent_tokenize(sentence)

Using spacy:

import spacy

nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_sm')
text = "How are you today? I hope you have a great day"
tokens = nlp(text)
for sent in tokens.sents:
    print(sent.string.strip())

If NLTK's sent_tokenize is not a thing (e.g. needs a lot of GPU RAM on long text) and regex doesn't work properly across languages, sentence splitter might be try worth.

Might as well throw this in, since this is the first post that showed up for sentence split by n sentences.

This works with a variable split length, which indicates the sentences that get joined together in the end.

import nltk
//nltk.download('punkt')
from more_itertools import windowed

split_length = 3 // 3 sentences for example 

elements = nltk.tokenize.sent_tokenize(text)
segments = windowed(elements, n=split_length, step=split_length)
text_splits = []
for seg in segments:
          txt = " ".join([t for t in seg if t])
          if len(txt) > 0:
                text_splits.append(txt)

You could make a new tokenizer for Russian (and some other languages) using this function:

def russianTokenizer(text):
    result = text
    result = result.replace('.', ' . ')
    result = result.replace(' .  .  . ', ' ... ')
    result = result.replace(',', ' , ')
    result = result.replace(':', ' : ')
    result = result.replace(';', ' ; ')
    result = result.replace('!', ' ! ')
    result = result.replace('?', ' ? ')
    result = result.replace('\"', ' \" ')
    result = result.replace('\'', ' \' ')
    result = result.replace('(', ' ( ')
    result = result.replace(')', ' ) ')	
    result = result.replace('  ', ' ')
    result = result.replace('  ', ' ')
    result = result.replace('  ', ' ')
    result = result.replace('  ', ' ')
    result = result.strip()
    result = result.split(' ')
    return result

and then call it in this way:

text = 'вы выполняете поиск, используя Google SSL;'
tokens = russianTokenizer(text)

No doubt that NLTK is the most suitable for the purpose. But getting started with NLTK is quite painful (But once you install it - you just reap the rewards)

So here is simple re based code available at http://pythonicprose.blogspot.com/2009/09/python-split-paragraph-into-sentences.html

# split up a paragraph into sentences
# using regular expressions


def splitParagraphIntoSentences(paragraph):
    ''' break a paragraph into sentences
        and return a list '''
    import re
    # to split by multile characters

    #   regular expressions are easiest (and fastest)
    sentenceEnders = re.compile('[.!?]')
    sentenceList = sentenceEnders.split(paragraph)
    return sentenceList


if __name__ == '__main__':
    p = """This is a sentence.  This is an excited sentence! And do you think this is a question?"""

    sentences = splitParagraphIntoSentences(p)
    for s in sentences:
        print s.strip()

#output:
#   This is a sentence
#   This is an excited sentence

#   And do you think this is a question 

Also, be wary of additional top level domains that aren't included in some of the answers above.

For example .info, .biz, .ru, .online will throw some sentence parsers but aren't included above.

Here's some info on frequency of top level domains: https://www.westhost.com/blog/the-most-popular-top-level-domains-in-2017/

That could be addressed by editing the code above to read:

alphabets= "([A-Za-z])"
prefixes = "(Mr|St|Mrs|Ms|Dr)[.]"
suffixes = "(Inc|Ltd|Jr|Sr|Co)"
starters = "(Mr|Mrs|Ms|Dr|He\s|She\s|It\s|They\s|Their\s|Our\s|We\s|But\s|However\s|That\s|This\s|Wherever)"
acronyms = "([A-Z][.][A-Z][.](?:[A-Z][.])?)"
websites = "[.](com|net|org|io|gov|ai|edu|co.uk|ru|info|biz|online)"

Using Stanza a natural language processing library that works for many human languages.

import stanza

stanza.download('en')
nlp = stanza.Pipeline(lang='en', processors='tokenize')

doc = nlp(t_en)
for sentence in doc.sentences:
    print(sentence.text)

I had to read subtitles files and split them into sentences. After pre-processing (like removing time information etc in the .srt files), the variable fullFile contained the full text of the subtitle file. The below crude way neatly split them into sentences. Probably I was lucky that the sentences always ended (correctly) with a space. Try this first and if it has any exceptions, add more checks and balances.

# Very approximate way to split the text into sentences - Break after ? . and !
fullFile = re.sub("(\!|\?|\.) ","\\1<BRK>",fullFile)
sentences = fullFile.split("<BRK>");
sentFile = open("./sentences.out", "w+");
for line in sentences:
    sentFile.write (line);
    sentFile.write ("\n");
sentFile.close;

Oh! well. I now realize that since my content was Spanish, I did not have the issues of dealing with "Mr. Smith" etc. Still, if someone wants a quick and dirty parser...

i hope this will help you on latin,chinese,arabic text

import re

punctuation = re.compile(r"([^\d+])(\.|!|\?|;|\n|。|！|？|；|…|　|!|؟|؛)+")
lines = []

with open('myData.txt','r',encoding="utf-8") as myFile:
    lines = punctuation.sub(r"\1\2<pad>", myFile.read())
    lines = [line.strip() for line in lines.split("<pad>") if line.strip()]

> Was working on similar task and came across this query, by following few links and working on few exercises for nltk the below code worked for me like magic.

from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize 
  
text = "Hello everyone. Welcome to GeeksforGeeks. You are studying NLP article"
sent_tokenize(text) 

output:

['Hello everyone.', 'Welcome to GeeksforGeeks.', 'You are studying NLP article']

Source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/nlp-how-tokenizing-text-sentence-words-works/

using spacy

import spacy
nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_sm')
doc = nlp(u'This is first.This is second.This is Thired ')
for sentence in doc.sents:
  print(sentence)

But if you want to do get a sentence by index Example:

#don't work
 doc.sents[0]

Use

list( doc.sents)[0]