A simple English language syllable counter, plus readability score measure-er. The package has been optimized to be very efficient, both in terms of run time performance and memory consumption. The main methods sylcount() and readability() are both vectorized by document. Scores for multiple documents are computed in parallel.
The stable version is available on CRAN:
The development version is maintained on GitHub:
Let’s start with some very simple data:
library(sylcount)
a = "I am the very model of a modern major general."
b = "I have information vegetable, animal, and mineral."We can easily get the readability of one “document”:
readability(a)
# chars words nonwords sents sylls polys re gl ari smog
# 1 36 10 0 1 16 1 61.325 7.19 25.70125 8.841846Both at once, scored one at a time:
readability(c(a, b))
# chars words nonwords sents sylls polys re gl ari smog
# 1 36 10 0 1 16 1 61.325000 7.19000 25.70125 8.841846
# 2 41 7 0 1 17 4 -5.727143 15.79714 11.56941 14.554593Both at once, scored as a single document:
readability(paste0(a, b, collapse=" "))
# chars words nonwords sents sylls polys re gl ari smog
# 1 77 17 0 2 33 5 33.98397 10.63088 18.6353 12.16174We can also just get the syllable counts if we want. The interface/behavior is similar to the above readability scoring function:
sylcount(a)
# [[1]]
# [1] 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 3
sylcount(c(a, b))
# [[1]]
# [1] 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 3
#
# [[2]]
# [1] 1 1 4 4 3 1 3
sylcount(paste(a, b, collapse=" "))
# [[1]]
# [1] 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 3 1 1 4 4 3 1 3
sylcount(a, counts.only=FALSE)
# [[1]]
# word syllables
# 1 I 1
# 2 am 1
# 3 the 1
# 4 very 2
# 5 model 2
# 6 of 1
# 7 a 1
# 8 modern 2
# 9 major 2
# 10 general 3The syllable counter first looks up each word in a hash table to see if its syllable count is known. If not, it uses a vowel counting rule to try to approximate it. The hash table uses a perfect hash function generated by gperf. For more information, see ?sylcount.
For a source for the readability measures, see ?readability.
For performance considerations, the maximum length allowed for a word is 64 characters. Anything longer will be treated as a “non-word”. See the package documentation for readability() and sylcount() for more details.