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

[Kevin Atkinson]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Børre Gaup wrote:

> Láv, skábmamánu 25. b. 2006 13.52, Kevin Atkinson ÿÿálii:
> > On Sat, 25 Nov 2006, Børre Gaup wrote:
> > > The problem is that hunspell is not as ubiquitous as aspell. As far as I
> > > have seen hunspell is not commonly used, but aspell is used both in Linux
> > > and in Mac OS X (through Cocoaspell). Hunspell is _intended_ to replace
> > > myspell in openoffice.org (according to it's homepage).
> > >
> > > What features in hunspell would you specifically like to have in aspell?
> >
> > Possibly:
> >
> > - Max. 65535 affix classes and twofold affix stripping
> I had a brief look at hunspell documentation of their dictionaries and affix
> files. As far as I understand twofold affix stripping means that you
> can "stack" two different affixes after one another, or in other words, make
> one affix point to another, just the way one word points to an affix in an
> aspell dictionary.
>
> En example from sami, the verb muitalit (to tell)
>
> in present tense it has for example these forms:
> muital  -an
>                 -at
>                 -a
>                 -edne
>                 -eahppi
>                 -eaba
>                 -ehpet
>
> Behind each of these forms it is legal to add the
> clitcs: -ge, -ba, -bat, -go, -son, -han, and a few more.
>
> So in current aspell we would have to have both the -an and -an+clitics form
> in the affix file, but if it had twofold affix stripping we could just point
> to verb suffixes to point to the clitics, is that correct?

Yes

> We also have verbs where the stem changes. Diehtit (to know) is an example
> (same tense and form as above):
>
> dieÿÿ           -án
>                 -át
> dieht   -á
> diht            -e
> dieht   -ibeahtti
>                 -iba
>                 -ibehtet
>
> Is there a way to tell that the three forms of stems are in fact the same word
> to aspell so that we can handle them as one form, instead of three? Or would
> some of the features mentioned below be of any help for this phenomen?

I honestly don't know.   Sorry.

> > - Handling conditional affixes, circumfixes, fogemorphemes, forbidden
> >    words, pseudoroots and homonyms.
> >
> > - Support complex compoundings
> >
> > I believe some of these will benefit you.
> >
> > However I only want to implement them if these is a clear benefit to it.
> > For example based on what several people have told be complex compounding
> > rules are not worth it.
> >
> > Aspell is far more complex then Myspell and each feature needs to
> > implemented carefully so that it will behave sensibly with the
> > suggestion code.  Also it is important that the addition of the
> > feature won't degrade performance, Especially when the feature isn't used.
>
> Perhaps some of these features could be plugins, where different languages
> load different plugins, according to their needs?

These are not the type of things that can easily pluggable.  Its better 
that they get integrated into the core.