Gary Wilcox

I would take screen-prints of your Internet application and paste then into your Powerpoint presentations.
--Gary

For a first whack at it I would try...
having name value pairs for the following 20 words. 1-18 being modifiers for the last 2.
"one" through "nine" (matched up to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
"ten" through "ninety" (matched up to 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90)
"hundred" (matched to 100)
"thousand" (matched to 1000)
keep a running count and a stack as you parse the words in the input.
long myCount = 0;
Vector myVector = new Vector();
continue to parse the input words adding them to myVector until you reach the next modifier word (the first 18 constants). At that point multiply out everything in myVector adding the product to myCount. Then clear() the Vector and continue parsing your input.
for your example of...
Five thousand three hundred forty five
Initially "Five" would be added to myVector and then "thousand" would be added to myVector. Then "three" would be parsed and identified as a "modifier" so myVector would be processed, hence...
myCount += 5 * 1000; // myCount == 5000
the next 3 additions to myCount following the same logic would be...
myCount += 3 * 100; // myCount = 5300
myCount += 40; // myCount = 5340
myCount += 5; // myCount = 5345
Then System.out.println(myCount); would yield the desired "5345"
I hope this helped and wasn't too wordy.
--Gary