Detecting if a string contains a "real sentence"?

Question

Is there some library out there that can figure out if a given string of characters contains a "real sentence" in English, meaning that it contains words from English? (The sentence need not make sense, but it should contains real English words)

For example, the following is not a sentence (at least in English:) -

hsgdhjf asdf dsusdf udfhpiew

Answer 1

You can ensure that every word is spelled correctly using a spelling checker (there are a number of libraries for this, none of which I have used) but that still won't tell you if the sentence is grammatical. Furthermore, an English speaker would probably consider a sentence "real" even if it had some errors, and some words aren't in the dictionary.

The best way to do this remains to have your program show the alleged sentence to a human being who speaks English, and ask them if it is a "real sentence."

Answer 2

This is an unsolved problem, as computers have no idea of what "makes sense". Even if it tries to parse a sentence by detecting nouns, verbs, etc, there are still phrases like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" or "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" that would get through. I doubt many people would say those are sentences.

There are also multiple ways of parsing sentences, for example "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" can be parsed as:

• adjective noun verb article noun; noun verb preposition article noun
• noun verb preposition article noun; adjective noun verb article noun

to take just two ways.

The bottom line: parsing natural language is hard, and making sense of it is even harder.