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@faizanhuda12 faizanhuda12 commented Nov 19, 2025

Description

This PR resolves issue #13883, which caused incorrect sentence segmentation for text containing quoted dialogue, particularly with guillemets (« »).

The Bug

The Sentencizer did not track quote nesting depth. As a result, it would prematurely split sentences whenever it encountered sentence-ending punctuation (!, ?, .) inside a quote, fragmenting dialogue into multiple incorrect sentences.

How to Reproduce the Bug

The following code demonstrates the incorrect behavior on an unpatched version of spaCy:

import spacy

nlp = spacy.blank("fr")
nlp.add_pipe("sentencizer")
text = "Léa dit : « Bonjour ! Je suis Léa. Et toi ? » Marc répond : « Salut ! Je suis Marc. »"
doc = nlp(text)

print("Sentences Detected (Incorrect):")
for i, sent in enumerate(doc.sents):
    print(f"  {i+1}. {sent.text}")

Incorrect Output (Before Fix):

Sentences Detected (Incorrect):
  1. Léa dit : « Bonjour !
  2. Je suis Léa.
  3. Et toi ? »
  4. Marc répond : « Salut !
  5. Je suis Marc. »

The Fix

The fix makes the Sentencizer context-aware of quotes by updating the prediction logic in spacy/pipeline/sentencizer.pyx:

  • Quote Depth Tracking: A quote_depth counter now tracks when the tokenizer is inside a quoted section, handling various quote types (symmetric and asymmetric) and nested quotes.
  • Deferred Splitting: A pending_split_after_quote flag defers sentence splits when punctuation is found inside a quote, applying the split only after the quote is closed.
  • Robustness: The logic gracefully handles malformed input like unopened or unclosed quotes.

With this fix, the reproduction code now produces the Correct Output:

Sentences Detected (Correct):
  1. Léa dit : « Bonjour ! Je suis Léa. Et toi ? »
  2. Marc répond : « Salut ! Je suis Marc. »

Testing and Validation

The modified component compiles successfully and has been validated against a comprehensive test suite (139+ test cases) simulating the sentencizer's logic. Testing confirmed that the fix resolves the original bug and introduces no regressions. The validation covered:

  • Original Bug: The exact reproduction case from sentence segmentation handling of guillemets #13883.
  • Multilingual: 25+ languages, including French, German, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic.
  • Edge Cases: Nested quotes, unclosed/unopened quotes, and mixed quote types.
  • Backward Compatibility: All existing functionality is preserved.

Types of change

A bug fix.

Checklist

  • I confirm that I have the right to submit this contribution under the project's MIT license.
  • I ran the tests, and all new and existing tests passed.
  • My changes don't require a change to the documentation, or if they do, I've added all required information.

Fixes incorrect sentence segmentation within quoted text by adding quote depth tracking to the sentencizer to correctly handle punctuation inside dialogue.
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