On Nov 30, 2005, at 22:02, Dave Howell wrote:

> you can solve all "Mr./Dr./Ph.D." cases by the fact that if a word  
> starts with a cap and ends with a period, it's not a sentence.

I'm not sure that's a very good rule, Dave. There are two sentences  
here.

The above rule may catch titular abbreviations, but over-generalises  
to produce a false negative in the above example.  So in solving one  
problem, you introduce another one.  It's relatively easy to make  
another rule to catch the problem in this case, but it would probably  
have been simpler to just make a specific rule to eliminate titular  
abbreviations, since there really aren't that many of them.

matthew smillie.