SentenceSplitter.java

package edu.northwestern.at.utils.corpuslinguistics.sentencesplitter;

/*	Please see the license information at the end of this file. */

import java.util.*;

import edu.northwestern.at.utils.corpuslinguistics.postagger.guesser.*;
import edu.northwestern.at.utils.corpuslinguistics.tokenizer.*;

/**	Interface for splitting text into sentences. */

public interface SentenceSplitter
{
	/**	Set part of speech guesser.
	 *
	 *	@param	partOfSpeechGuesser		Part of speech guesser.
	 *
	 *	<p>
	 *	A sentence splitter may use part of speech information
	 *	to disambiguate end-of-sentence boundary conditions.
	 *	The part of speech guesser provides access to the
	 *	lexicons and guessing algorithms for determining the
	 *	possible parts of speech for a word without performing
	 *	a full part of speech tagging operation.
	 *	</p>
	 */

	public void setPartOfSpeechGuesser
	(
		PartOfSpeechGuesser partOfSpeechGuesser
	);

	/**	Set sentence splitter iterator.
	 *
	 *	@param	sentenceSplitterIterator	Sentence splitter iterator.
	 */

	public void setSentenceSplitterIterator
	(
		SentenceSplitterIterator sentenceSplitterIterator
	);

	/**	Break text into sentences and tokens.
	 *
	 *	@param	text		Text to break into sentences and tokens.
	 *	@param	tokenizer	Tokenizer to use for breaking sentences
	 *						into words.
	 *
	 *	@return				List of sentences.  Each sentence
	 *						is itself a list of word tokens.
	 *
	 *	<p>
	 *	Word tokens may be words, numbers, punctuation, etc.
	 *	</p>
	 */

	public List<List<String>> extractSentences
	(
		String text ,
		WordTokenizer tokenizer
	);

	/**	Break text into sentences and tokens.
	 *
	 *	@param	text		Text to break into sentences and tokens.
	 *
	 *	@return				List of sentences.  Each sentence
	 *						is itself a list of word tokens.
	 *
	 *	<p>
	 *	Word tokens may be words, numbers, punctuation, etc.  The default
	 *	word tokenizer is used.
	 *	</p>
	 */

	public List<List<String>> extractSentences( String text );

	/**	Find starting offsets of sentences extracted from a text.
	 *
	 *	@param	text			Text from which sentences were
	 *							extracted.
	 *
	 *	@param	sentences		List of sentences (each a list of
	 *							words) extracted from text.
	 *
	 *							N.B.  If the sentences aren't from
	 *							the specified text, the resulting
	 *							offsets will be meaningless.
	 *
	 *	@return					int array of starting offsets in text
	 *							for each sentence.  The first offset
	 *							starts at 0.  There is one more offset
	 *							than the number of sentences -- the
	 *							last offset is where the sentence
	 *							after the last sentence would start.
	 */

	public int[] findSentenceOffsets
	(
		String text ,
		List<List<String>> sentences
	);
}

/*
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   Northwestern University
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