Re: Supporting multiple affixes for Agglutinative Languages in OpenOffice's Hunspell

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 2:57 AM, Edmond Kachale
<[email protected]> wrote:
> One of the languages I am working on is agglutinative in nature. The most
> afflicted sentence constituent is verb, which can carry up to 20 affixes
> (both prefixes and suffixes).
>
> I wonder if anyone knows how to enable this feature in OpenOffice's
> hunspell. I would like to support multiple affixes as follows:
> PFX + PFX + PFX + PFX + VERB + SFX + SFX + SFX + SFX + SFX
> e.g. ndi + kana + dza + ku + lemb + ets + er + a + ni + tu
> => ndikanadzakulembetseranitu (=I would have registered for you)
>
> I have tried using COMPLEXPREFIXES flag and continuation classes (as in PFX
> G 0 dza/ABCE .) but this makes it understand only two-fold affixes.
>
> I might be missing something, but I would like to support n-fold for an
> abrtriary 0 <= n <= 20.
>
> I'm using this reference:
>
> http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/dapper/man4/hunspell.4.html
> http://pwet.fr/man/linux/fichiers_speciaux/hunspell


Hi Edmond,
    I'll second László's point that you can get by with two-fold affix
stripping if you're willing to generate the affix file automatically,
and willing to accept the extra memory overhead.
    László mentioned Basque and Hungarian; here's an example closer to
home (Lingala):
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02139.html

  Since sending that message, I've fleshed out a similar system for
Kinyarwanda, which is substantially more complex than Lingala, and
packaged it here:

http://borel.slu.edu/ispell/affixgen-rw-0.01.tar.gz

Kevin