Announce: Hspell 1.1

[Nadav Har'El]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009, E L wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell 1.1":
> I think the main problem is what need to be done and not the man power to
> program it.
> If someone know of what are the rules grammar or nikud checkers should
> follow I'm sure it won't be a big
> deal programing one

I beg to differ.

First of all, most of the needed knowledge already exists, published in
numerous papers and books, and demonstrated by several pieces of commercial
software. One doesn't need to come with advanced knowledge of the topic,
any more than I had to be some spell-checking expert before I started Hspell.
All one needs is a willingness to learn, and of course the resourcefulness
to put it into good use.

Second, while the work on Hspell had a lot of very interesting theoretical
sides and problems to solve (in linguistics, language, compression, etc.),
most of the work was actually the mundane and almost endless task of making
lists of words (a task which you can see, still isn't done 10 years after
starting the project). For niqqud checking, there is also a lot of similar
mundane work that needs to be done (writing the right niqqud for each word),
and that takes a lot of time.
For grammar checking, it depends what you call grammar: If you also want
to include semantics, and not just grammar - like Prof. Uzzi Ornan did in
his text-to-speech and niqqud research (and product) - there's also tons
of work that needs to be done on creating classes of nouns, listing arguments
of verbs, and so on. I guess you can start with just grammar, though, and
in this case, you're right - it should be doable without too much data
collection - so maybe this is indeed a good project to start with.

This is all very interesting work. Unfortunately, I do not see myself
starting it in the near future. If anyone is interested in taking a shot
at it, I'd love to advise - please contact me and/or Dan privately.

Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Thursday, Dec 31 2009, 14 Tevet 5770
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I couldn't afford a cool signature, so I
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |just got this one.