caribon 0.5.0

A repetition detector program and library
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Caribon

A repetition detector written in Rust.

Why?

In some languages it is considered poor style to repeat a word too often in a text (particularly a literary text). The purpose of this tool is to assist a writer in detecting those repetitions.

Why the name?

A text is composed of words, themselves composed of characters, which in french are called caractères. In french, good is bon so caribon is essentially good characters.

Alright, this doesn't make much sense, I'll admit I just found the name funny.

How?

Internally, Caribon use a stemming library (https://github.com/lady-segfault/stemmer-rs, the Rust bindings for Snowball C implementation: http://snowball.tartarus.org/) to reduce words to their stems, which allows e.g. to see a singular and a plural as the "same" word. Then it's just counting the repetitions, and outputting HTML.

Build

You'll need Rust and Cargo, see install instructions. Then

$ cargo build

should do the job (it works with Rust 1.1). You can then run caribon either with:

$ cargo run

or by directly executing the binary (in target/debug or target/release).

If you plan to use cargo run, note that command-line arguments must be prefixed by -- so cargo gives them to the binary:

$ cargo run -- --input=some_text.txt --output=output.html

You can also install the caribon binary somewhere in your path (e.g. /usr/local/bin) but currently there is no install/uninstall option, so you'll have to do it manually.

Once you have generated an HTML file, just open it with your favorite browser and see your repetitions. Words that are repeated too closely are underlined in green, orange and red (depending on the number of repetitions); words that appear globally too often are underlined in blue.

Example

Here is an example of Caribon used on a (previous) version of this README, using the following command:

cargo run -- --language=english --input=README.html --output=example.html

Usage

Caribon, version 0.5.0 by Élisabeth Henry <liz.henry@ouvaton.org>

Detects the repetitions in a text and renders a HTML document highlighting them

Options:
--help: displays this message
--version: displays program version
--list-languages: lists the implemented languages
--language=[language]: sets the language of the text (default: french)
--input=[filename]: sets input file (default: stdin)
--output=[filename]: sets output file (default: stdout)
--ignore=[string]: a string containing custom ignored words, separated by spaces or comma
    (default: use a builtin list that depends on the language)
--max-distance=[value]: sets max distance (used by local and leak algorithm) (default: 50)
--threshold=[value]: sets threshold value for underlining local repetitions (default: 1.9)
--global-threshold=[value]: sets threshold value for underlining global repetitions (default: 0.01)
--html=[true|false]: enables/disable HTML input (default: true)
--ignore-proper=[true|false]: if true, try to detect proper nouns and don't count them (default: false)

Library

It is possible to use Caribon as a library. The documentation is available here; in order to get the latest version, you can also generate it with cargo doc.

Current features

  • Built-in list of ignored words (common words whose repetitions don't matter) for french and english, though they are not complete.
  • Basic support for other languages supported by the Snowball (http://snowball.tartarus.org/) project.
  • Count repetitions locally and globally.
  • Detects HTML tags in input. It doesn't work with a full HTML file (containing <html>, <body> and so on) but it works fine if you use e.g pandoc -o file.html file.md.
  • Outputs a basic HTML files which higlights the detected repetitions.

ChangeLog

See here.

License

Caribon is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or (at your convenience) any ulterior version.

Author

Élisabeth Henry <liz.henry at ouvaton.org>.

This software uses (rust bindings to) the C Stemming library written by Dr Martin Porter, licensed under the BSD License.

ToDo

Library

  • Render prettier output files;
  • Allow tokenizer to have in input "full" (with ,, tags) HTML documents;
  • Complete builtin lists of ignored words and provide them for other languages (currently, only french, and english);
  • Provide algorithm to detect repetitions of expressions, not just single words;
  • Find better default values;
  • Enhance documentation and add tests.

See also

caribon-server, a work-in-progress project that runs Caribon as a web server.