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I'm wondering how to detect English plurals in natural language sentences.

Such as:

fish
computers
houses
...

Using Earley parsing I'm able to get to the s or no-s, but I have difficulties in understanding how to figure out whether the ending s is because the word is in plural form. Or whether with no-s the word is in plural form.

Is this kind of thing doable without some database of words and their plurals? I could leverage such database though, if such exists.

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    $\begingroup$ You will need a database, and such databases (called dictionaries) exist. $\endgroup$
    – Yuval Filmus
    Dec 18, 2015 at 14:22
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    $\begingroup$ If bus is not the plural of bu and the plural of woman is not womans, this approach is doomed. I don't know what your big end goal is, but the pattern of your questions is consistent: you lack basic expertise. I recommend you consult experts (CS, lingustics, NLP) if this is about work, or start at the bottom if it's pleasure. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael ♦
    Jan 8, 2016 at 17:36

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Morphological parsing requires a lexicon (stems and their part of speech) , morphotactics (ordering of morpheme classes), and orthographic rules (e.g. fox + PL = foxes rather than foxs).

The preferred approach is to use a composition of finite state transducers to map a surface level representation (e.g., foxes) into its lexical representation (e.g., fox +N +Pl).

For a robust method, you are better off using an existing system like Foma, lttoolbox, or SFST than writing your own system since these systems come with rich morphological data sets.

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