dmitryr's blog : Simple English Noun Pluralizer in C#

Thursday, January 11, 2007 1:24 PM DmitryR

Simple English Noun Pluralizer in C#

When working on Web Services support for Dynamic Languages I needed a simple pluralizer for English nouns, and I did put one together that I would like to share.

The algorithm is very simple:
1) There is a list of special nouns that is looked up first.
2) There is a list of suffix substitutions that is a applied next.
3) Everything else gets 's' appended.

Please download the attached ZIP file, compile the .cs file (it requires .NET Framework v2.0) and run it:

C:\temp>csc Pluralizer.cs
Microsoft (R) Visual C# 2005 Compiler version 8.00.50727.42
for Microsoft (R) Windows (R) 2005 Framework version 2.0.50727
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2001-2005. All rights reserved.

C:\temp>Pluralizer.exe
> class
classes
> type
types
> werewolf
werewolves
> leaf
leaves
> index
indices
>

Please give it a try and let me know for what words (or classes of words) it fails

Attachment(s): Pluralizer.zip

Comments

# re: Simple English Noun Pluralizer in C#

Thursday, January 11, 2007 8:56 PM by OrthoFR

Hi Dmitry,

I think there are specific cases that are not captured by these rules. For instance, proper names in –y have a plural in –ys, not –ies (the reunification of the two Germanys, the Kennedys, two Bloody Marys…). You might also want to add plurals like "phenomena". I also guess you don’t want to generate plurals like Frenches, Englishes, Spanishes, or Turkishes… The plural of corpus is also corpora…

What do you plan to do with uncountable nouns in English, which have no plural form? I can see you include “news”, which is fine, but don’t include “information”, “advice”, “luggage”, etc… (you don’t want to produce “informations”, “advices” or “luggages”). Only a dictionary would give you this linguistic information, since the list is actually very long.

Why don’t you try to make use of the existing word-breakers we have developed for lots and lots of languages? (including English, of course). As my colleague Jay Waltmunson points out on our team’s blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/naturallanguage/archive/2006/09/14/754779.aspx ), what you want to do corresponds to expansive stemming (which is more complex than we actually think, even in English, as you can see). In languages other than English, associating inflections can generate hundreds of forms (e.g., in Turkish a noun can have thousands of related inflections). If you want to adapt your algorithm to other languages, you might want to consider using such word-breakers (our Natural Language Group develops these linguistic resources for word-breakers (stemmers and lemmatizers) as well as for spell-checkers, grammar checkers, thesauri…).

Thierry (Fontenelle)

Natural Language Group - Program Manager

# re: Simple English Noun Pluralizer in C#

Thursday, January 11, 2007 9:32 PM by andersonimes

There are certain situations where an apostrophie is needed to represent a plural, such as when you are talking about a number of words or letters:

"There are too many B's in this word and too many the's in this sentence."

You opened yourself a can of worms, sir.

# re: Simple English Noun Pluralizer in C#

Thursday, January 11, 2007 9:44 PM by DmitryR

Yes, I realize that a general purpose solution for pluralization is very complex. What I was looking to do it to come up with a reasonable names for collections of named items, that's all there is to it.

Thanks,

Dmitry

# Pluralization(s) can be singularly difficult

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 3:15 AM by Sorting It All Out

A tribute to plurals, with fondest memories of the first comedian I ever enjoyed, Allan Sherman (original

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Simple English Noun Pluralizer in C#

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# Pluralization(s) can be singularly difficult