Re: [Aspell-user] Re: Feedback on our approach to Arabic

[Ethan Bradford]

It's somewhat beyond my current scope to find out which words are
archaic -- I'm just going with Tim Buckwalter's decisions.

However, your suggestion about multi dictionaries can help with another difficulty for Arabic.  In its most formal form, vowels and other pronounciation hints are added, but normally they aren't.  I hate to claim that the other way is wrong, but can't think of a way to do that with a general dictionary.

Instead, your suggestion makes me think I can create a formal dictionary and an informal dictionary, and let the user choose which to use with the multi file.

On 3/14/06, Gary Setter <address@hidden> wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lars Aronsson" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2006 7:59 PM
Subject: Re: [Aspell-user] Re: Feedback on our approach to Arabic


> Ethan Bradford wrote:
>
> > I don't see having archaic words as a particular problem.  It
> > only reduces quality when a user misspells into one.
>
> The words in the dictionary are not only allowed in the text,
but
> also used as suggestions. Suppose your English dictionary
contains
> both OLD and OLDE (which is an older spelling of OLD). When the
> user by mistake happens to write OLED, the software could
suggest
> "perhaps you mean OLDE?" which will be quite confusing to the
> user.
>
> I scan and OCR a lot of old books in Danish and Swedish, and
have
> to build my own dictionaries of old spellings to support OCR.
I
> also maintain my own personal aspell dictionary.  But I do this
in
> two pieces.  My main dictionary is for current spellings, and
then
> I have a small add-on dictionary that only contains the old
forms.
> For OCR I use both, but with Aspell I only use the main
> dictionary.
>
> Every language needs a good dictionary (or two).  But then a
> spell-checker also needs a good way to find the right
suggestion.
> This is the real strength of Aspell, at least for English.
>
Hi,
You might look into multi dictionaries. My main dictionary is
en_US.multi, which is simply a text file with this line:
add master.rws
Which adds a read only dictionary. You can have as many add
commands as you need. You can even add another .multi file.
You can find more information in the aspell documentation.

Best regards,
Gary



_______________________________________________
Aspell-user mailing list
address@hidden
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-user