Re^3: Lingua: Transform "wasn't" into "was not"

It's not just the confusability between "possessive 's vs. contracted 's", but also confusability between "'s contracted from is vs. 's contracted from has" -- for example:

John's father is old. (possessive)
John's old. (contracted from "John is")
John's been sick. (contracted from "John has")

There's also some possible ambiguity with 'd, although this is relatively rare:

He'd never done that before. (contracted from "He had")
He'd never do that again. (contracted from "He would")

Apart from those cases, every other English contraction has a distinct full form.

If you're just trying to see whether two strings are identical except for contracted vs. uncontracted forms, it should work if you normalize both strings by applying contraction wherever possible, then seeing if they match.

I suppose there's a way to do it by expanding the contractions instead, but that's a lot more complicated.

Comment on Re^3: Lingua: Transform "wasn't" into "was not"

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Re^4: Lingua: Transform "wasn't" into "was not" by LanX (Saint) on Apr 16, 2014 at 07:19 UTC
Shouldn't most of these s contractions (except the possessive case) be restricted to spoken English? Cheers Rolf ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)	[reply]
Re^5: Lingua: Transform "wasn't" into "was not" by choroba (Cardinal) on Apr 16, 2014 at 08:34 UTC
That's what I was taught. But my current English teacher (she's from London) says it's no longer true. Using long forms in normal mails and e-mails feels very formal and old fashined, she says. لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ	[reply]
Re^6: Lingua: Transform "wasn't" into "was not" by LanX (Saint) on Apr 16, 2014 at 09:19 UTC
So how is the OP's code supposed to know the diff between "she is thought to work as a nurse" and "she has thought to work as a nurse" ? I have the impression that English will contract soon to just two words ("yeah" and "great") and the meaning has to be figured out by context. great! ;) Cheers Rolf ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)	[reply]
Re^5: Lingua: Transform "wasn't" into "was not" by graff (Chancellor) on Apr 17, 2014 at 03:15 UTC
Shouldn't most of these s contractions (except the possessive case) be restricted to spoken English? Shouldn't text data always be "correct"? Of course it should! What's wrong with all those idiots who can't follow the rules when they type?! Why should programmers have to worry about stupid mistakes in text data? And while we're on the subject, why are so many people using those silly non-ASCII characters that look like apostrophes but really aren't? It really pisses me off when they do that - they should just be using the standard ASCII apostrophe, the way God intended!	[reply]