quelqu'hui

tokenizer for contemporary french (designed to be used with spacy).

text	tokens
peut-on	peut -on
prends-les	prends -les
Villar-les-bois	Villar-les-bois
lecteur-rice-x-s	lecteur-rice-x-s
correcteur·rices	correcteur·rices
mais.maintenant	mais . maintenant
relecteur.rice.s	relecteur.rice.s
10.2	10.2
p.10	p. 10
autre(s)	autre(s)
(autres)	( autres )
(autre(s))	( autre(s) )
www.on-tenk.com.	www.on-tenk.com .
oui..?	oui ..?
aujourd'hui	aujourd'hui
c'est	c' est
dedans/dehors	dedans / dehors
02/10/2024	02/10/2024
:-)	:-)
(:happy:)	( :happy: )

usage

use as a tokenizer in a spacy pipeline:

import quelquhui
import spacy

nlp = spacy.load('fr_core_news_sm')
nlp.tokenizer = quelquhui.Toquenizer(nlp.vocab)

use as a independant tokenizer (with no dependencies):

import quelquhui

qh = quelquhui.light.Toquenizer()
doc = qh("la machine à (b)rouiller le temps s'est peut-être dérailler...")

installation

git clone https://github.com/thjbdvlt/quelquhui quelquhui
cd quelquhui
pip install .

configuration

very few options can be set to modify the tokenizer behavior:

import quelquhui

qh = quelquhui.Toquenizer(
    abbrev = ["ref", "ed[s]"], # support regex
    inclusive = True, # default
    emoticon = True, # default
    url = True, # default
    regexurl = r"(?:\w+://|www\.)[\S]+[\w/]", # default
    regexemoticon = r":-?[\)\(]", # (default one is too long to be reproduced here.)
    chars = {
        "APOSTROPHE": "'`´’" # default
        "HYPHEN": "-–—",  # default
        # signs you'll set here will replace defaults.
        # other won't be changed.
        # complete list with default values can be found with
        # `quelquhui.default.Chars.__dict__`
    }
    words = {
        "ELISION": ["j", "s", "c"], # ...
        "INVERSION": ["je", "tu", "on"], # ...
        "SUFF_FEMININE": ["e", "rice", "ère"], # ...
        "SUFF_NONBINARY": ["x"],
        "SUFF_PLURAL": ["s", "x"],
        # there's only these 5. 
        # (default lists for the first three are longer.)
    }
)

how it works

1. split text on spaces.
2. it re-splits using a few functions (looped) that produced frozen tokens which won't be tokenized by next functions/steps (typically: urls, or text-emoji like :happy:, which may be hard to tokenized in cases like (:happy:); we don't want the regex looking for emoticons to match :): i need to defines rules to be applied in a specific order).
3. for each resulting substring:
   1. list characters on which words must be split. typically: punctuation marks, such as comma or period. let's say they are then considered token boundaries.
   2. list characters that must be kept together, even if they have been listed in step 2.i.
   3. remove 2.i from 2.ii, and split on remainings splitting characters.

period

in most cases, a period is a token distinct from the word it follows: a period ending a sentence obviously isn't part of the word it follows. but in some cases, a period actually is a part of a word (abbreviations: p. 10), and in some other cases, the period and the letters following it must be kept in the token (inclusive language: auteur.rice.s). these cases are exceptions, hence they are handled in 2.ii: i remove them from periods found in 2.i. the pattern in 2.i will be: \. (match period wherever it is, without any condition), while the pattern in 2.ii could be (if simplified) (?<=[^a-z][a-z])\.|\.(?=rice|s) (match period if preceded by a single letter or followed by rice or s).

hyphen

in most cases, a hyphen isn't a token boundary, because in french the hyphen is a sign that says "these two words are actually one word", such as in Vaison-la-romaine. but in some cases, they don't: in case of verb-subject inversion (mostly). these cases are easily described and handled with a regular expression, because subjects in these cases are always personnal pronoums: -(?=je|tu|.... there are also a few cases where the following word is not a pronominalized subject, but a pronominalized object, such as prends-les, with is also easily handled in a regular expression. hence, the pattern for hyphen in 2.i is not (as for period) unconditional and simple, but rather complex and conditional (match hyphen if followed by pronominalized subject or object).

dependencies

• python3
• optionnel: spacy