Dividing text into sentences

When we work with text, we can work with text units on different scales: we can work at the level of the document itself, such as a newspaper article; the paragraph, the sentence, or the word. Sentences are the main unit of processing in many NLP tasks. In this section, I will show you how to divide text into sentences.

Getting ready

For this part, we will be using the text of the book The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. You can find the whole text in the book's GitHub (see the sherlock_holmes.txt file). For this recipe, we will need just the beginning of the book, which can be found in the sherlock_holmes_1.txt file.

In order to do this task, you will need the nltk package and its sentence tokenizers, described in the Technical requirements section.

How to do it…

We will now divide the text of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, outputting a list of sentences:

1. Import the nltk package:

   import nltk

2. Read in the book text...