Re: [aspell-devel] Big wordlist and affix lexicons

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006, Børre Gaup wrote:

> I work in a project which is going to make spellcheckers for Northern and Lule
> Sami, among others a high-quality Aspell spell checker.
>
> We use Xerox two-level morphological tools to make fullform word lists. The
> Northern Sami fullform word list is now about 24GB. The word list can be
> broken down into word forms covering a single stem + inflection and other
> endings. Each word can have up to 16000 unique endings, and the set of
> inflectional endings a word can have varies. We thus have several such sets
> of inflectional endings. The exact number needed for Aspell is not yet known,
> but the present Xerox-based lexicons have more than 150 such sets.

It sounds like hunspell might be a better choice since it supports twofold 
affix stripping.  I would very mush like to incorporate many of hunspell 
features into Aspell but I simply don't have the time.  I would greatly 
appreciate any help in this area.

> We made an affix file containing the 16000 unique endings one of our words
> had, and that file alone became 1.5 MB. Our calculations tell us that if we
> continue in this vein for all our words, we will end up with an affix file
> that can be as big as 50MB.
>
> As far as we understand there are 52 available affix classes for the affix
> file. It is probable that we would need more affix classes than the existing
> 52. Is it possible to increase this number?

More like around 200 since you can use any 8-bit symbol.

> If that is not possible, we will probably end up with a very big wordlist,
> amounting up to some gigabyte. How well will aspell tackle a wordlist of that
> size?

Well Aspell should do just fine if it will all fit in memory.  All bets 
all of it if doesn't.