[aspell-announce] The New Aspell News and Updates

[Kevin Atkinson]

[From now on these updates will only be posted to the new Aspell
mailing lists posted on Savannah.  Go to
http://mail.freesoftware.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-announce to
subscribe.]


* Affix Compression

Kevin B. Hendricks has extracted the affix compression code from
Ispell and has created a separate utility with it called myspell.  You
can find this program in the download area of Savannah
(http://freesoftware.fsf.org/download/aspell/).  Now all that needs to
be done is to integrate it into the new Aspell.  I plan on doing this
something soon but help would be appreciated.

The Myspell code is actually already in use in OpenOffice as part of
the lingucomponent component.  More information can be found at
http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/lingucomponent/.  The latest version
of myspell is also available there.

Please note that Affix Compression is currently *not* compatible with
Aspell soundslike suggestion strategy and I *do* not suggest using it
with the English language.  Affix Compression is good for relatively
phonetic languages which tend to have a lot of suffixes and prefixes
such as many of the European languages.


* Aspell.Net

The Aspell.Net domain is now up and working.  At the moment though it
will just redirect you to the Savannah project page.


* Masters Theses

It is highly likely that my Masters theses will be about some aspect
of Aspell.  It will most likely be on the suggestion algorithm as
based on my research so far my approach is truly unique.  However, it
may branch off into others areas.  One area I may pursue is being able
to provide the same quality of suggestions Aspell currently delivers
but at the same time support some form of affix compression or other
space saving measures so that non-phonetic languages which also have a
large numbers of prefixes and suffixes can benefit from Aspell
soundslike suggestion strategy with out having the word list take up
30 megs of memory or more.


* Future Plans

As soon as finals are over I will have a roughly a month and a half to
devote to the new Aspell.  In that time I hope to bring the new Aspell
to a point where it can be used in place of Pspell so that it can be
tested with applications such as AbiWord, OpenOffice, etc.

I will keep you posted.

--
Kevin
The Aspell/Pspell/New Aspell Maintainer