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NAME

Harvey::Word - Perl extension for creating word objects

SYNOPSIS

  use Harvey::Word;
  my $W = Word->new("grape");

    Word object module for Harvey.  Looks up information on
    a word for all forms and gives information to calling objects.

    Version 1.02 Overhauled and improved word.txt/word.db database.
    Added better cross referencing to move between verb, noun, adj and
    adverb forms.

DESCRIPTION

  The purpose of the Word module is to create Word objects that can be 
  queried for syntactic information about the word.

    Version 1.01, words can be queried for their dictionary form, part 
    of speech, many attributes on the basis of the part of speech, 
    frequency, what persons are possible, i.e. 1st singular, 3rd plural, 
    etc., and the likeliest parts of speech that the word could be based 
    on the frequencies in the BNC.

    Most methods which return a characteristic of the word can also be 
    used to turn on or off the characteristic by passing a 0 or 1 for
    boolean flags, text for text queries and numbers for the frequency.

    The data is used from a TIE hash database, but can be exported/imported
    from the ASCII file word.txt using the export_word and import_word 
    functions.  

  The following methods are supported:

    new:        Constructor.
    text:       Get the text of the word. Version 1.02 - added the ability
                to pass in a standard expression for pattern matching
                against the text of the object, in which case a boolean
                is returned.
    load_tie:   Load a word record from the TIE hash (%t_word) into the 
                memory hash (%word). Done automatically from the constructor.
    prioritize: Returns an ordered array of the most likely parts of speech
                for a given word based on the BNC frequency counts.
    choice:     Returns an array of strings of the most likely POS choices 
                for a word object based on BNC freqeuncy counts.
    noun:       Retuns the noun flags if the word is a noun, otherwise 0.  Can
                be used as a boolean test for whether the word can be a noun, 
                but also can set or retieve the noun flags for a word, which are
                stored as bytes in an integer.  To set the flags, send in an 
                integer as the argument.        
    verb:       Same as noun, but for verbs.
    adjective:  Same as noun, but for adjectives.
    adverb:     Same as noun, but for adverbs.
    modal:      Same as noun, but for modals.
    pronoun:    Same as noun, but for pronouns.
    preposition:        Same as noun, but for prepositions.
    determiner: Same as noun, but for determiners.
    conjunction:        Same as noun, but for conjunctions.
    noun_freq:  Gets/set the noun frequency.
    verb_freq:  Gets/set the verb frequency.
    adjective_freq:     Gets/set the adjective frequency.
    adverb_freq:        Gets/set the adverb frequency.
    modal_freq: Gets/set the modal frequency.
    pronoun_freq:       Gets/set the pronoun frequency.
    preposition_freq:   Gets/set the preposition frequency.
    delete_word: Destroy the current word object
    determiner_freq:    Gets/set the determiner frequency.
    conjunction_freq:   Gets/set the conjunction frequency.
    coord_conjunction:  Gets/set coordinating flag for conjunctions.
    subord_conjunction:         Gets/set subordinating flag for conjunctions.
    adverb_preposition: Gets/set whether preposition can be used 
                        alone as adverb.
    base_adjective:     Gets/set base flag for adjectives.
    comparative_adjective:      Gets/set comparative flag for adjectives.
    superlative_adjective:      Gets/set superlative flag for adjectives.
    base_adverb:        Gets/set base adverb flag.
    comparative_adverb: Gets/set comparative adverb flag.
    superlative_adverb: Gets/set superlative adverb flag.
    singular determiner:        Gets/set singular flag for determiners.
    plural_determiner:  Get/set plural flag for determiners.
    standalone_determiner:      Get/set standalone flag for determiners.
    question_determiner:        Get/set question flag for determiners.
    first_pronoun:      Get/set first person flag for pronouns.
    second_pronoun:     Get/set second person flag for pronouns.
    third_pronoun:      Get/set third person flag for pronouns.
    singular_pronoun:   Get/set singular flag for pronouns.
    plural_pronoun:     Get/set plural flag for pronouns.
    masculine_pronoun:  Get/set masculine flag for pronouns.
    feminine_pronoun:   Get/set feminine flag for pronouns.
    neuter_pronoun:     Get/set neuter flag for pronouns.
    nominative_pronoun: Get/set nominative flag for pronouns.
    accusativey_pronoun:        Get/set accusative flag for pronouns.
    genitive_pronoun:   Get/set genitive flag for pronouns.
    person_pronoun:     Get/set person flag for pronouns.
    place_pronoun:      Get/set place flag for pronouns.
    thing_pronoun:      Get/set thing flag for pronouns.
    reflexive_pronoun:  Get/set reflexive flag for pronouns.
    question_pronoun:   Get/set question flag for pronouns.
    adjectival_pronoun: Get/set adjectival flag for pronouns: our your
    standalone_pronoun: Get/set standalone flag for pronouns: ours yours
    singular_noun:      Get/set singular flag for nouns.
    plural_noun:        Get/set plural flag for nouns.
    numberless_noun:    Get/set numberless flag for nouns.
    proper_noun:        Get/set proper flag for nouns.
    masculine_noun:     Get/set masculine flag for nouns.
    feminine_noun:      Get/set feminine flag for nouns.
    neuter_noun:        Get/set neuter flag for nouns.
    starter_noun:       Get/set starter flag for nouns.
    infinitive_verb:    Get/set infinitive flag for verbs.
    past_verb:  Get/set infinitive flag for verbs.
    participle_verb:    Get/set infinitive flag for verbs.
    third_verb: Get/set infinitive flag for verbs.
    gerund_verb:        Get/set infinitive flag for verbs.
    present_verb:       Get/set infinitive flag for verbs.
    starter_verb:       Get/set infinitive flag for verbs.
    noun_dictionary:    Get/set dictionary form for a noun, ie. singular.
    verb_dictionary:    Get/set dictionary form for a verb, ie. infinitive,
                        1.02 added argument to verb_dictionary.  Pass in
                        the verb part (Present|Past|Third|Infinitive|Gerrund
                        |Participle) to determine the most likely infinitive.
    adjective_dictionary: Get/set dictionary form for a adjective i.e. base
    adverb_dictionary:  Get/set dictionary form for a adverb, i.e. base form
    noun_persons:       Returns the possible persons for a noun.  The 'persons'
                        functions return an Integer with the possible persons
                        (i.e. first singular, second plural, etc) stored as
                        bits.  This makes it easy to check for Subject verb
                        agreement or pronoun/noun agreement by 'anding' the
                        flags together.
    pronoun_persons:    Returns the possible persons for a pronoun.
    verb_persons:       Returns the possible persons for a verb.
    modal_persons:  Added with 1.02 since modals have slightly different
                    person patterns, e.g. can as a modal works with 'he',
                    while can as a verb does not.
    tie_hash:   Ties the hash, %t_word to the file dic/word.db. 
    import_word:        Builds the hash TIE file 'dic/word.db' from
                        the text file 'word.txt'.
    export_word:        Exports data from the TIE file 'dic/word.db' 
                        to the text file 'word.txt'.

EXPORT

None by default.

AUTHOR

Chris Meyer, <chris@mytechs.com> www.mytechs.com

COPYWRITE Copywrite (c) 2002, Chris Meyer. All rights reserved. This is free software and can be used under the same terms as Perl itself.

VERSION

  1.02

RELATED LIBRARIES

  My heartfelt thanks to Adam Kilgarriff for his work on the BNC 
  (British National Corpus) which forms the basis for the word.db.
  I have added and massaged it a bit, but I would never have gotten
  this far without it.  The BNC can be visited at
  http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uc/~Adam.Kilgarriff/bnc-readme.html.

perl.