ICU Segmentation Library (WebAssembly port)

Provides natural language text segmentation based on the ICU (International Components for Unicode) C++ library, ported to WebAssembly.

• Character segmentation finds the boundaries between grapheme clusters, which may be longer than a single Unicode codepoint, taking into account various linguistic properties
• Word segmentation finds boundaries between words, based on rulesets. It also supports more challenging languages like Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Khmer, which require specialized lexicons to determine the boundaries
• Line break boundary detection finds potential locations where a line break can be added, for the purpose of word-wrapping
• Sentence segmentation finds sentence boundaries based on rulesets and language-specific lexicons
• Supports all recent JavaScript runtimes (Node.js and browsers)

Installation

npm install @echogarden/icu-segmentation-wasm

Note: package size is about 32 MB uncompressed (13.5 MB gzipped), due to the size of the ICU data bundled into the WebAssembly binary.

Usage

Split operations

Return an array of strings representing the parts.

import * as ICUSegmantation from '@echogarden/icu-segmentation-wasm'

await ICUSegmantation.initialize()

const str = 'Hello World! How are you doing today?'

console.log(ICUSegmantation.splitToCharacters(str))
// Outputs: [
//   'H','e','l','l','o',' ','W','o','r','l','d','!',' ','H','o','w',' ','a','r','e',' ',
//   'y','o', 'u',' ','d','o','i','n','g',' ','t','o','d','a','y','?'
// ]

console.log(ICUSegmantation.splitToWords(str))
// Outputs: [
//	'Hello', ' ', 'World', '!', ' ', 'How', ' ', 'are', ' ',
//  'you', ' ', 'doing', ' ', 'today', '?'
// ]

console.log(ICUSegmantation.splitToSentences(str, 'en'))
// Outputs: [
//   'Hello World! ',
//   'How are you doing today?'
// ]

Iterator operations

Provides an iterator for sequence of boundary indexes.

They return a JavaScript iterator that can be consumed by a for..of loop:

createCharacterBreakIterator(text, lanaguge?)
createWordBreakIterator(text, lanaguge?)
createLineBreakIterator(text, lanaguge?)
createSentenceBreakIterator(text, lanaguge?)

Example usage of an iterator:

const text = 'Привет, мир! Как у тебя дела сегодня?'

for (const boundaryIndex of createSentenceBreakIterator(text, 'ru')) {
    console.log(boundaryIndex)
}

// Outputs:
// 0
// 13
// 37

Building the WebAssembly module

See this guide, which goes through the process of how ICU is built and linked to the WebAssembly wrapper used in this package.

License

MIT