[OT?] Re: A (too huge) Arabic word-list (with prefixes) for spell-checkers

Hi Dan, Mohammed,
What would it take to port Hspell to Arabic? That is, to make the code 
adaptable to any of the Semitic languages? Would it be possible to have 
one spellchecker for both Hebrew and Arabic?

  - yba


On Tue, 16 May 2006, Mohammed Sameer wrote:

> Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 12:26:48 +0300
> From: Mohammed Sameer <[email protected]>
> To: Development Discussions <[email protected]>
> Cc: Ivrix Discussions <[email protected]>,
>     Dan Kenigsberg <danken-FrESSTt7Abv7r6psnUbsSmZHpeb/A1Y/@public.gmane.org>
> Subject: Re: A (too huge) Arabic word-list (with prefixes) for spell-checkers
> 
> On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 11:28:18AM +0300, Dan Kenigsberg wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I have converted Tim Buckwalter's database of Arabic - including all suffixes
>> and prefixes - to the Aspell format. This makes it possible to spell-check
>> Arabic in Aspell, Mozilla Thunderbird, and OpenOffice - if you can spare some
>> 200Mb of RAM.
>>
> > It is freely available under the GPL, on
>> 	http://ivrix.org.il/projects/arabic .
>>
>
> Hi Dan,
>
> Note: I'm not criticizing, I'm just stating facts and trying to be constructive
>
> Originally, I worked on a fork of Duali, The Arabic spell checker by M. Elzubeir.
> I then realized that aspell can do it and that we do not need an Arabic spell checker.
>
> I had a look at the Buckwalter data since it was the data set for both spell checkers.
>
> Something we didn't notice before we didn't have a working spell checker implementation.
> The data set contains words from the Holy Quran, The words in the Holy Quran are sometimes
> spelled in a different way due to the script used to write the Quran.
>
> Those words are incorrect outside the Quran context.
>
> Which leads to 2 points:
> 1) Those words are not correct
> 2) The data files contain a small set of incorrect words "Maybe this is a problem with
> my implementation of the Buckwalter algorithm".
> 3) The affix data is huge and IMHO not easy to modify/extend which means
> that it'll be hard to strip those words.
>
> This is why I decided to ignore the Buckwalter data and work on a new data set.
>
> I know about a google project to create a dictionary from the Buckwalter data which
> makes me wonder, Why don't you cooperate with them ?
>
> PS. Why "DICT ar EG ar" only in dictionary.lst ? ;-)
>
> Best wishes,
>
>

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