Find Word Occurrence Count | Dataford Interview Questions

Motional software may need lightweight text statistics when inspecting diagnostic messages. Given a sentence, count how many times each word appears.

A word is a maximal contiguous sequence of ASCII letters or digits. Matching is case-insensitive, and punctuation separates words but is not included in the result. Return a dictionary mapping each normalized lowercase word to its occurrence count. The order of dictionary entries does not matter.

Formal Specification

Implement count_word_occurrences(sentence), where sentence is a string. Return a dictionary whose keys are lowercase words and whose values are positive integer counts. If the sentence contains no words, return an empty dictionary.

Constraints

0 <= len(sentence) <= 10^5
The input contains ASCII letters, digits, whitespace, and punctuation
Words contain at least one ASCII letter or digit
Matching is case-insensitive

Function Signature

def count_word_occurrences(sentence):

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