Ttykuu

I wrote an NLP script for processing Turkish language. Yesterday I added syllabication but I wonder if it could be done better. It is kinda hard-coded, so I would like to know if I can improve it.

Here is the syllabication part.

def syllabicate(self, word):
 """
 :param word: The word to be syllabicated
 :return: The syllabicated list that contains syllabs
 """
 word = word.lower()
 syllabs = []
 syllab = ""
 keep_index = 0
 last_was_vowel = False
 next_is_vowel = False

 for let_ind in range(len(word)):
 if let_ind != len(word) - 1:
 if word[let_ind + 1] in self.vowels:
 next_is_vowel = True
 else:
 next_is_vowel = False
 else:
 syllab = word[keep_index:]
 syllabs.append(syllab)
 break

 if next_is_vowel and not last_was_vowel and syllab:
 syllabs.append(syllab)
 syllab = ""
 keep_index = let_ind

 elif next_is_vowel and word[let_ind] not in self.vowels and syllab:
 syllabs.append(syllab)
 syllab = ""
 keep_index = let_ind

 syllab += word[let_ind]

 if word[let_ind] in self.vowels:
 last_was_vowel = True
 else:
 last_was_vowel = False

 return syllabs

First of all you should know that the script doesn't syllabize properly for every word. For example if you give the word authenticated the function returns ['aut', 'hen', 'ti', 'ca', 'ted'] which is incorrect. The correct case would be ['au','then','ti','cat','ed']. However I do not know how to fix that.

Edit: The point made above doesn't stand since this script isn't for the english language.

Second you have a lot of ifs where you check if a character is a vowel like this:

if word[let_ind] in self.vowels:
 last_was_vowel = True
 else:
 last_was_vowel = False

They could be written better like this:

last_was_vowel = word[let_ind] in self.vowels

Or even better I would have written a function that checks if a letter is a vowel.

def is_vowel(self, char):
 return char in self.vowels

The first if in your for loop

if let_ind != len(word) - 1:
 if word[let_ind + 1] in self.vowels:
 next_is_vowel = True
 else:
 next_is_vowel = False
else:
 syllab = word[keep_index:]
 syllabs.append(syllab)
 break

checks if the next one is a vowel except the last char.
It would be more good looking like this:

for pos, char in enumerate(word[:-1]):
 next_is_vowel = self.is_vowel(word[pos + 1])
 ...

syllab = word[keep_index:]
syllabs.append(syllab)

We enumerate through the word to get the position of the letter and
the letter itself. The word[:-1] means we are going to iterate the whole word except its last letter.

Lastly you got 2 ifs here that do the same thing. You also don't need the keep_index.

if next_is_vowel and not last_was_vowel and syllab:
 syllabs.append(syllab)
 syllab = ""

elif next_is_vowel and word[let_ind] not in self.vowels and syllab:
 syllabs.append(syllab)
 syllab = ""

The could be easily written as one if like this:

if next_is_vowel and syllab and not (last_was_vowel and self.is_vowel(char)):
 syllabs.append(syllab)
 syllab = ""

The place where the keep index was used can be replaced like this
from syllab = word[keep_index:] to syllab += word[-1]

With these changes in mind the code looks now like this.

def is_vowel(self, char):
 """

 :param char: the character to check
 :return: bool depending if the char is a vowel
 """
 return char in self.vowels

def syllabicate(self, word):
 """
 :param word: The word to be syllabicated
 :return: The syllabicated list that contains syllabs
 """
 word = word.lower()
 syllabs = []
 syllab = ""
 last_was_vowel = False
 # we don't want the last character

 for pos, char in enumerate(word[:-1]):
 next_is_vowel = self.is_vowel(word[pos + 1])

 if next_is_vowel and syllab and not (last_was_vowel and self.is_vowel(char)):

 syllabs.append(syllab)
 syllab = ""

 syllab += char
 last_was_vowel = self.is_vowel(char)

 syllab += word[-1]
 syllabs.append(syllab)

 return syllabs