Can you programmatically detect pluralizations of English words, and derive the singular form?

Question

Given some (English) word that we shall assume is a plural, is it possible to derive the singular form? I\'d like to avoid lookup/dictionary tables if possi

Answer 1

It is not possible, as nickf has already said. It would be simple for the classes of words you have described, but what about all the words that end with s naturally? My name, Marius, for example, is not plural of Mariu. Same with Bus I guess. Pluralization of words in English is a one way function (a hash function), and you usually need the rest of the sentence or paragraph for context.