Finding first sentence in a paragraph

Question

I have a string which basically contains a paragraph. There might be line breaks. Now I would want to get only the 1st sentence in the string. I thought I would try

indexOf(". ") 

that is a dot with a space.

The problem is that this won't work though on a line such as firstName. LastName.

I'm using .Net. Is there a good method available to achieve this? Im also tagging Java to see if I can narrow down my search.

Answer 1

What you need is a Natural Language Parsing (NLP) toolkit. It's very hard to write one yourself, as it requires a lot of research and data collection, but luckily it has already been done for you.

• List of natural language processing toolkits

.NET

• Natural Language Processing Toolkit for .NET
• SharpNLP

SharpNLP is a collection of natural language processing tools written in C#. Currently it provides the following NLP tools:

• a sentence splitter
• ...

Java

• Which NLP toolkit to use in JAVA?
• How can I split a text into sentences using the Stanford parser?