sentenceboundary

Sentence boundary refers to the determination of the end of a sentence. In written text, sentence boundaries are typically marked by punctuation, most commonly a period (.), question mark (?), or exclamation point (!). However, identifying sentence boundaries can be more complex than simply looking for these punctuation marks.

Challenges in sentence boundary detection include abbreviations that use periods, such as "Mr." or "etc.", which do not signify the end of a sentence. Similarly, ellipses (...) can represent omissions or pauses within a sentence, not necessarily its conclusion. The use of quotation marks can also introduce ambiguity, as punctuation might appear inside or outside the closing quotation mark, potentially affecting the perceived sentence boundary.

In natural language processing (NLP), sentence boundary detection, also known as sentence splitting or sentence segmentation, is a crucial preprocessing step. Accurate sentence segmentation is essential for many downstream tasks, including information retrieval, machine translation, and text summarization. Various algorithms and rule-based systems have been developed to address the complexities and improve the accuracy of automatically detecting sentence boundaries in text. These systems often rely on a combination of punctuation rules, lists of abbreviations, and contextual analysis to distinguish true sentence endings from other uses of terminal punctuation.