[aspell] Re: aspell RPMS and dictionaries available

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Kenneth Christiansen wrote:
> 
> > In responce to consernes about dictionary size I wrote:
>
> > 1) Aspell will now be able to due without the Soundslike lookup
> >    table at the expense of suggestion quality which may be
> >    virtually noticeable for languages with phonetic spelling.
> >    This will cut the space usage by roughly 50%.
> >    This change is already in the CVS version. 
> 
> I do not quite understand what you want to gather by this. One of the
> strainght of aspell with danish is that it is able to suggest some really
> good words by using the phonetic information we have created. 
> 
> I will see it as a great lost, if this information isn't used in the
> danish dictionary!

Unfortunately I doubt you can have it both ways.  Aspell without using the
soundslike table will search for words within two edit distance. Languages
with phonetic languages the change will not be very noticeable.  Languages
with out a lot of affixation but non-phonetic spelling the space usage is
not a major deal. Danish will be a real challenge because it has both a
high affixation level and non Phonetic spelling.

The reason for this change is because it is a first step towards affix
compression.

If you can think of a way to have both affix compression AND good
suggestion based on soundslike lookup please let me know.

> > 2) Aspell will use far less memory when creating the dictionary file.
> >    If necessary I will use temporary files and mmap them in instead
> >    of just using memory.
>
> Sounds really good

-- 
Kevin Atkinson
address@hidden
http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/