On Wed, 14 Sep 2011, F Wolff wrote:
>
> Hi Kevin
>
> I'm mostly a bystander on this list (Abiword localiser), but do have
> some interest in Enchant (I'm a developer for Virtaal which uses the
> Enchant API), and maintain spell checking libraries for South African
> languages.
Thanks for you comments.
A few notes below.
> Some people have looked at things like foma for constructing better
> spell checkers, and if they have success on the NLP side, obviously they
> wouldn't want to integrate it separately with each major consumer of
> this type of technology. Enchant works wonderfully in this way as it
> allows a new spell checking engines to be used by many applications. Not
> having to write support for personal word lists, etc. is a big win.
And that is one of my main points and why I believe Enchant has a future.
I think Dominic Lachowicz is selling him self short. He wrote a very
successful piece of code. (Something which by the way I tried long ago
and failed miserably with the Pspell/Aspell combination).
> That said, if somebody wants to get Enchant/Aspell to work with any of
> these projects, the code in the Voikko project is probably the best
> start available.
Yes, but there is also Google chrome, which doesn't have a Voikko model.
> About integration into Mozilla products and Chrome, we have to realise
> that they place a humongous emphasis on performance these days, and
> might not accept something if it represents a noticeable regression in
> any of startup time, executable size, memory consumption or CPU time.
Funny you should say that, because in many ways Aspell can actually help
here. Especially as far as load times for large dictionaries (Aspell
dictionaries are precompiled and are then mmap in, thus loading a
dictionary requires essentially no work).
> For me as somebody doing a lot of work in non-English languages, I can
> assure you that either of Aspell or Hunspell are great for English! In
> that sense I struggle to see why better suggestions would be a major
> selling point for Aspell (if that is indeed the major one), since it is
> probably "good enough" for many people, and if you are used to spell
> checkers fairly often missing words, the relative quality of suggestions
> might not be appreciated.
Well, you likely can spell better than I can, often I have a hard time
figuring out how to spell a word, being able to spell a word phonetically
is where Aspell's strength is. As far as often missing words, can you give
me some examples offline, I am also the maintainer of the
American and Canadian dictionaries for both Hunspell and Aspell and the
British dictionary for Aspell (for Hunspell a different dictionary is used,
but that might change soon, since that has not been updated in a while).
> Of course I completely acknowledge that there
> is still room for improvement. It is far more true for a lot of other
> languages. To some extent we count on people leading the way in the
> major languages with better features like context sensitive spelling.
I think frequency sensitive spell checking will come first, since its a
lot easier to implement. But, I think that enchant should support an
interface which makes both possible.
Received on Thu Sep 15 01:50:17 2011
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