Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 22:28:47 -0400 (EDT) From: Kevin Atkinson To: aspell-user@lists.souceforge.net Cc: aspell-announce@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Affix Compression Support For Aspell Affix Compression Support For Aspell _may_ be coming in the near future. For those of you who don't know affix compression is the act of combining several words with a common base word into one word which consists of the base word and a list of affixes to apply. (Affix is the generic term for prefix, suffix or infix). For example "alarm alarms alarmed alarming" will become "alarm/SDG" where SDG stands for the suffixes of alarm. This can make a huge difference in space for languages with have extensive affixation such as German. The lack of Affix support in Aspell is the number one reason people still use Ispell. Hopefully once this is done Ispell can finally bit the dust for most people. However, I would like to if possible do a better job than Ispell so I would appreciate some feedback from people who have worked with Ispell affix compression on the type of things you would like to see better. I have already decided that the affix flags are going to be stored as characters rather than a 32 or 64 bit field. This will allow up to around 256 flags to be used with out killing space. At the same time I would like to add decent support for run-together words in Aspell. However, I am clueless as what needs to be done in order to support this in a manner in which it can be used without introducing too many false results. A few people comments how simply trying to join any two word is two broad. Unfortunately I don't know what needs to be done to narrow it. Should certain group of words only be joined with other group of words or is this still to general. Feedback desperately needed here. Thanks in advance for all who can help. Sorry for posting this to the list, but I wanted this message to get the maximum exposure. --- Kevin Atkinson kevina at users sourceforge net http://www.ibiblio.org/kevina/