How can I Count every word with three or more syllables in each group of sentences, even if the same word appears more than once.

Count every word with three or more syllables in each group of sentences, even if the same word appears more than once from a text file

syllables means a unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants, forming the whole or a part of a word;

[KSSV]

An example will help....

[Rik]

In many languages syllables are tricky to count, and every language has its own rules. I could give you my script that separates Dutch words in syllables, but I bet that won't help you.

Splitting strings into words is trivial with a regular expression. For an example, see the doc for regexp. Part of learning to program is knowing how to separate your tasks into chunks that can be solved on their own. Your current question contains two parts where one is almost trivial with a regexp (but can be solved with for loops and a lot of comparing), and another which is highly dependent on the language involved and may be impossible without a dictionary.

[Nipun]

I tried with its like finding words which has more than three vowels (aeiou)in one word. and calculate total words from that file I've used this but I found all words that has vowels not more than 2.

fid =fopen('hello.txt','r');
str = fread(fid, Inf, '*char');
vowel='AaEeIiOoUu';

Numofsyllables = sum(ismember(str,vowel) )

[Stephen23]

@Sruthi Yeruva: it really is not a trivial task to count/separate syllables in English. I suspect that combining some rules with a large exceptions list would be the only realistic solution.

These might be of interest to you:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/61882-hyphenate

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/336796-counting-syllables-in-text-from-a-txt-file

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/327658-how-to-split-syllables-of-a-word-into-matlab

[John D'Errico]

Surely you don't think that the number of syllables in a word is defined simply by counting the number of vowels? That would imply that if a word has two vowels, it must have two syllables?

Anyway, how many syllables does the word "peaceful" have? I count 4 vowels, but only two syllables.

Hmm. How about the word "boathouse"? 5 vowels by my count, but only 2 syllables.

Worse, there are many syllabically ambiguous words in the english language. Thus is “fire” spoken as fah-yer or fayr? Depending on how you say the words, it has one or two syllables.

Or how about the words: "owl", "prowl", and "towel". One or two syllables? Owl seems to have two syllables to me, the way I speak it, but only one vowel.

http://shapingwords.blogspot.com/2010/09/syllabic-ambiguities.html

Sorry, but very simple rules to count the number of syllables will be a difficult task, if they fail to count the number of syllables in even very simple words.

[Rik]

I seem to recall Korean does work this way, when transliterated to the latin alphabet, so there counting syllables would be as easy as counting vowels.

So I would advise you to have a look at the links Stephen and John provided if you are considering English text (which I presume is the case with a file named hello.txt), or clarify what language you are talking about.

[Walter Roberson]

We have discussed breaking text into words a few times: it is not easy. See for example https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/355353-how-to-scan-a-sentence-of-text-one-by-one-word-and-store-it-in-seperate-memory-location#comment_487942

[Image Analyst]

What is a "sentence"? A text string, or an audio waveform? You'd have different solutions in the two cases.

Also, do you have a look up table of the number of syllables that each word you expect to encounter has? This would make it much easier of course.

The number of syllables can depend on the accent. For example English in the southern US often adds extra syllables. For example "well" might be pronounced "way-uhl" in the south. Sometimes (though I think rarely), they eliminate syllables, e.g. "you all" becomes a single syllable "yall".

Answer 1

[OCDER]

The only way you can do this is by using a database of word-syllable. Here's one way using www.dictionary.com as the database.

FullText = 'This is a really arbitrary sentence.'; 
%'really' could be pronounced 'ree-uh-lee' (3 syl)

TextCell = regexp(FullText, '\w+', 'match'); 
TextSyl = cellfun(@(x) getSyllable(x), TextCell);
TextSyl =
     1     1     1     3     4     2  

OneSylWord = sum(TextSyl == 1);
OneSylWord = 
     3

Where getSyllable function is:

function Syl = getSyllable(Word)

if nargin == 0
    Word = input('What word do you want? ', 's');
end
if isempty(Word)
    Syl = 0;
    return
end
Word = strrep(Word, ' ', '');

% Use dictionary.com to get the phonetic transcription of a word
%  Ex: arbitrary
%    [ahr-bi-trer-ee]
% WARNING: will not work for some words if dictionary.com does not have it
%  listed as the main word. Example, 'awesomeness' returns 2 because
%' awesome' is the main word in the site.

try
    SiteTxt = urlread(sprintf('http://www.dictionary.com/browse/%s?s=t', Word));
catch
    warning('Could not determine syllable for "%s". Returning 0.', Word);
    Syl = 0;
    return
end

CodeSrch1 = '"pron spellpron"[\s\w\d\>]+\[\s*(?<InnerCode>[^\]]+)';
InnerCode = regexp(SiteTxt, CodeSrch1, 'tokens');
InnerCode = InnerCode{1};

CodeSrch2 = '>(?<Phonetics>[^\<]+)';
Phonetics = regexp(InnerCode, CodeSrch2, 'tokens');
Phonetics = [Phonetics{1}{:}];
if isempty(Phonetics)
    Syl = 1;
else
    Phonetics = cat(2, Phonetics{:});
    MultWord = regexp(Phonetics, ',', 'split'); %Sometimes many ways to say a word - take 1st option
    Syl = sum(MultWord{1} == '-') + 1;
end

[Nipun]

I tried the above the code with a .txt file... its giving me an error... Would you know the reason? I tried fixing it but its still not working....

Index exceeds matrix dimensions.

Error in untitled2>getSyllable (line 33) InnerCode = InnerCode{1};

Error in untitled2>@(x)getSyllable(x)

Error in untitled2 (line 5) TextSyl = cellfun(@(x) getSyllable(x), TextCell);

[OCDER]

In order for you to take in an .txt file, you have to read the text file first, store the words into a cell. Then word-by-word, use getSyllable to count the syllables (that's what cellfun is for).

Here's a sample for how to do this:

%Open the text file, store words into a cell
FID = fopen('sample.txt');
TextCell = textscan(FID, '%s'); %stores words in text file as cell array within a cell
fclose(FID);

%"pull out" the cell array within a cell via TextCell{1}, and also remove periods "." from the words too via strrep(x, '.', '').
TextCell = cellfun(@(x) strrep(x, '.', ''), TextCell{1}, 'UniformOutput', false);

%Here, you may want to get unique words to prevent searching web for the same word

%From here on, same thing as before
TextSyl = cellfun(@(x) getSyllable(x), TextCell);

OneSylWord = sum(TextSyl == 1);
OneSylWord =
    14

Note that it'll be slow since it's searching the web and parsing the website html code. To speed this up, you'll have to work on optimization and also finding unique words BEFORE using getSyllable. For instance, if there are 15 "you" in your text, this code will search the web 15 times to count the syllable, which is unnecessary. I shall leave it to you to optimize the code, but the harder syllable counting function is done for you :)

[Nipun]

Hi Donald, thanks for your help. I got your code working as you adviced me but there is a small issue - I'm getting an error with Index exceeds matrix dimensions. This error is coming up when the text file is big. can you help me with this please?

[Walter Roberson]

Replace

FID = fopen('sample.txt');

with

FID = fopen('sample.txt', 'rt', 'n', 'UTF-8');

However as I discussed before, this file includes characters such as “ . U+2013, U+2019, U+201C, and U+201D. The U+2013 is (as I described earlier) misused and should have been '-' .

[Nipun]

The problem is, that when the call

SiteTxt = webread(sprintf('http://www.dictionary.com/browse/%s?s=t', Word));

for the Word "Dr" returns some SiteText where the Tag

<span class="pron spellpron">[someResult] </span>

it is scanning the SiteText for remains empty. This in the following line

InnerCode = regexp(SiteTxt, CodeSrch1, 'tokens');

produces an empty array which causes the "Index exceeds matrix dimension" error. so I tried adding below code

if ~isempty(InnerCode)
    InnerCode = InnerCode{1};
    CodeSrch2 = '>(?<Phonetics>[^\<]+)';
    Phonetics = regexp(InnerCode, CodeSrch2, 'tokens');
    Phonetics = [Phonetics{1}{:}];
else
    % handle this case    
end

still have same issue.

[Walter Roberson]

You will need to build in the error checking yourself, since it is your assignment; Donald has shown you the general method and put in a warning that it does not always work.

[Nipun]

ok, will try, Thanks for the help

Answer 2

[Nipun]

Is there a way to use the word counter tool website to get all different types of Syllables count?

[Nipun]

for example https://wordcounttools.com this website calculates Syllables, Unique Words, Monosyllabic Words, Polysyllabic Words (≥3 syllables), Syllables per word, Difficult Words etc

[OCDER]

I checked the website and it seems to use some algorithm to count syllables. Even so, it states that it's not 100% accurate. You must use a word-syllable lookup table / database, because English is just one of those things you can't program via algorithms alone.

This is from the website you provided, https://wordcounttools.com/

"How is the number of syllable calculated? The number of syllables in a word is calculated based on the vowel pattern in the word. This number can not be guaranteed 100% accurate because there are many grammar rules and nuances, but it is pretty close. Thus, this metric is appropriate when the demand for accuracy is not very strict. "

Oh, and try to reserve the answer section ONLY for answers. I know it looks like a response section, but you had it right above writing in the comment section to the answers.