Highlighting nouns in LibreOffice Writer?

users
#1

Hi,

is there a way to highlight in a text in Writer just nouns in an English
text besides manually select nouns?

I mean is there such a tool to highlight just nouns with one click?

Or can I create a macro for this job?

#2

This may be a more complicated task that you imagine. Many words - in the sense of a particular strings of letters - may exist as words as more than one part of speech. If you detected nouns by looking words up in a dictionary of nouns, you would also catch many occurrences of words that were spelled identically to nouns but were actually serving as, say, verbs or adjectives in your text. In other words, you would need something that could reliably analyse the grammar of your text in order to detect whether the relevant words were being used as nouns or as something else in each occurrence.

For example, the short text of your own enquiry above has a number of words whose parts of speech could be misinterpreted without grammatical analysis. There are some words which are nouns in your text but which could also be other parts of speech:
click: could also be a verb
job: could also be a verb
macro: could also be an adjective
text: could also be a verb
tool: could also be a verb
way: could also be an adverb

And there are words which are not nouns in your text but which could be in another context (so would be detected as false positives):
can: a verb in your text but can also be a noun
English: a verb in your text but can also be a noun (or adjective)
highlight: a verb in your text but can also be a noun
mean: a verb in your text but can also be a noun (or adjective)
one: an adjective (determiner) in your text but can also be a noun

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#3

Hi Pál,

csanyipal schrieb:

Hi,

is there a way to highlight in a text in Writer just nouns in an English
text besides manually select nouns?

No, such tool does not exist.

What do you expect, such tool would do with the word "down"?

I mean is there such a tool to highlight just nouns with one click?

Or can I create a macro for this job?

Perhaps it is possible using the thesaurus. If you get only (noun) as type there, then it is likely a noun and you can mark it. But I don't know, how to use the thesaurus via macro.

Kind regards
Regina

#4

English speakers can verb anything.

#5

Indeed. I resisted the temptation to include "nouns" in my list from the text as a possible (third person singular) verb.

Brian Barker

#6

Hi Brian,

I understand your arguments.

I think this is at the moment impossible, even with the use of the
thesaurus, as Regina mentioned.

But one day in the near(?) future there will be an AI agent, "who" can help
me in this. Right?

#7

Tony,

Pál,

Hi Brian,

I understand your arguments.

I think this is at the moment impossible, even with the use of the
thesaurus, as Regina mentioned.

But one day in the near(?) future there will be an AI agent, "who"
can help
me in this. Right?

By then the AI agent could probably write the documents for you!!!

Regards,
Tony.

In the meantime, I'll name the nouns myself in the LibreOffice Writer.

#8

Pál,

Hi Brian,

I understand your arguments.

I think this is at the moment impossible, even with the use of the
thesaurus, as Regina mentioned.

But one day in the near(?) future there will be an AI agent, "who"
can help
me in this. Right?

By then the AI agent could probably write the documents for you!!!

Regards,
Tony.

#9

Indeed so. It is already the case, of course, that grammar checkers exist for various word processors - and they must effectively need to detect the part of speech of each word in order to do their work. Grammar checkers are currently not perfect, though. Try "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana": despite their apparent similarity, one of those "flies" is a verb, the other a noun.

Brian Barker

#10

Such critters are available for other software.

Fot LibO, the simplest approach would be to roll it into an extension, a la Language Tool's N-Gram component.

It would use its own database, -- sqlite, IIRC --- and it is large --- 25+ GB for English.

jonathon

#11

I've forgotten the name of the British newspaper mongol that has started replacing sports writers with bots.

About five years ago, a company in the US started selling software for preachers. You gave it the lectionary reading of the day, and it spat out an original three point sermon.

jonathon

#12

Brian Barker wrote:

I understand your arguments. I think this is at the moment
impossible, even with the use of the thesaurus, as Regina
mentioned. But one day in the near(?) future there will be an AI
agent, "who" can help me in this. Right?

Indeed so. It is already the case, of course, that grammar checkers
exist for various word processors - and they must effectively need
to detect the part of speech of each word in order to do their work.
Grammar checkers are currently not perfect, though. Try "Time flies
like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana": despite their apparent
similarity, one of those "flies" is a verb, the other a noun.

I'm not sure what "time flies" are (perhaps something from a sci-fi novel?), but fruit does indeed fly like a banana... ;o)