[aspell-announce] Affix Compression Support For Aspell

[Kevin Atkinson]

Affix Compression Support For Aspell _may_ be coming in the near future.
For those of you who don't know affix compression is the act of combining
several words with a common base word into one word which consists of the
base word and a list of affixes to apply.  (Affix is the generic term for
prefix, suffix or infix).   For example "alarm alarms alarmed alarming"
will become "alarm/SDG" where SDG stands for the suffixes of alarm.  This
can make a huge difference in space for languages with have extensive
affixation such as German.  The lack of Affix support in Aspell is the
number one reason people still use Ispell.  Hopefully once this is done
Ispell can finally bit the dust for most people.

However, I would like to if possible do a better job than Ispell so I
would appreciate some feedback from people who have worked with Ispell
affix compression on the type of things you would like to see better.  I
have already decided that the affix flags are going to be stored as
characters rather than a 32 or 64 bit field.  This will allow up to around
256 flags to be used with out killing space.

At the same time I would like to add decent support for run-together words in
Aspell.  However, I am clueless as what needs to be done in order to
support this in a manner in which it can be used without introducing too
many false results.  A few people comments how simply trying to join any
two word is two broad.  Unfortunately I don't know what needs to be done to
narrow it.  Should certain group of words only be joined with other group
of words or is this still to general.  Feedback desperately needed here.

Thanks in advance for all who can help.  Sorry for posting this to the
list, but I wanted this message to get the maximum exposure.

---
Kevin Atkinson
kevina at users sourceforge net
http://www.ibiblio.org/kevina/