#Sentence Boundary Detection (SBD)

Split text into sentences with a vanilla rule based approach (i.e working ~95% of the time).

• Split a text based on period, question- and exclamation marks.
  • Skips (most) abbreviations (Mr., Mrs., PhD.)
  • Skips numbers/currency
  • Skips urls, websites, email addresses, phone nr.
  • Counts ellipsis and ?! as single punctuation

Attribution

This is a fork of http://github.com/Tessmore/sbd by Fabiën Tesselaar. Most of this README is the same.

Installation

Use npm:

$ npm install @knod/sbd

How to

var tokenizer = require('sbd');

var text = "On Jan. 20, former Sen. Barack Obama became the 44th President of the U.S. Millions attended the Inauguration.";
var sentences = tokenizer.sentences(text, optional_options);

// Returns:
// [
//  'On Jan. 20, former Sen. Barack Obama became the 44th President of the U.S.',
//  'Millions attended the Inauguration.',
// ]

or

var tokenizer = require('sbd');

var text = "There are many copies. And they have a plan.";
var sentences = tokenizer.sentences(text, {parse_type: 'words'});

// Returns:
// [
//  [ 'There', 'are', 'many', 'copies.' ],
//  [ 'And', 'they', 'have', 'a', 'plan.' ]
// ]

See a demo at https://knod.github.io/sbd/

Optional options

Defaults:

var options = {
    "parse_type"          : "strings",
    "newline_boundaries"  : false,
    "html_boundaries"     : false,
    "html_boundaries_tags": ["p","div","ul","ol"],
    "sanitize"            : false,
    "allowed_tags"        : false,
    "abbreviations"       : null
};

• parse_type: Value can be either 'strings' or 'words'. 'strings' will turn your text into a list of sentences, each of which is a string. 'words' will turn your text into a list of sentences, each of which is a list of words.
• newline_boundaries: Force sentence split at newlines
• html_boundaries: Force sentence split at specific tags (br, and closing p, div, ul, ol)
• sanitize: If you don't expect nor want html in your text.
• allowed_tags: To sanitize html, the library santize-html is used. You can pass the allowed tags option.
• abbreviations: list of abbreviations to override the original ones for use with other languages. Don't put dots in abbreviations.

Contributing

You can run unit tests with npm test.

If you feel something is missing, you can open an issue at http://github.com/knod/sbd/issues stating the problem sentence and desired result. If code is unclear give me a @mention. Pull requests are welcome.

Building the (minified) scripts

(If you already have browserify, there's no need to include the first line)

npm install -g browserify

npm run-script build

Next

• Update tests for new capabilities
• New tests to show failing cases
• Remove html parsing. The combination of the two should happen in a separate module.