These items will eventually be implemented. I hope to have them all
done before I move aspell to beta testing. They are in the approximate
order of when they will get done.
These items all sound like good ideas however I am not sure when I
will get to implementing then if ever. If you are looking for a way
to contribute picking up on one of these ideas would be a great way
to start. They are presented in no particular order.
Come up with a plug-in for gEdit the gnome text editor.
Change languages (and thus dictionaries) based on the information
in the actual document.
Come up with a nroff mode for spell checking.
Come up with a mode that will skip words based on the symbols that
(almost) always surround the word. (Word skipping by context)
Create two server modes for Aspell. One that uses the DICT
protocol and one that uses ispell -a method of communication
of some arbitrary port.
Come up with thread safe personal dictionaries.
Use the Hidden Markov Model to base the suggestions on not
only the word itself but on the context around the word.
Having a way to emailthe personal dictionary and/or
replacement list to a particular address either periodical or when
it grows to a certain size.
Be able to accept words with spaces in them as many
languages have words such as as a word in a foreign phrases which
only make sense when followed by other words.
The following good ideas where found in the ispell WISHES file so
I thought I would pass them on.
Ispell should be smart enough to ignore hyphenation signs, such as
the TEX \- hyphenation indicator.
(Jeff Edmonds) The personal dictionary should be able to remove certain
words from the master dictionary, so that obscure words like "wether"
wouldn't mask favorite typos.
(Jeff Edmonds) It would be wonderful if ispell could correct inserted
spaces such as "th e" for "the"
or even "can not" for "cannot".
Since ispell has dictionaries available to it, it is conceivable that
it could automatically determine the language of a particular file
by choosing the dictionary that produced the fewest spelling errors
on the first few lines.
Due to the current way my spell checker works implementing affix compression
would be next to impossible. Nevertheless, I do realize that for some
languages affix compression is very important.
So to solve this dilemma I plan on having two different modes of my
spell checker: One with affix compression that does not use soundslike
pairs (much like ispell) and one without affix compression that does
use soundslike.
I plan to extract the affix manipulation code from Ispell with the
help of an Ispell author. The tricky part would be getting this to
getting this all to work properly at tun time bases on the dictionary
used.
This problem extends back to the fact of the way words are index is
Aspell. This problem will get resolved when I implanted the affix
compression mode as only one index would be used.
I want to implement this give other people an idea of how it should
be done and because I am really sick of having to spell check through
url and email address.
This was posted on the Aspell mailing list on January 1, 1999:
I had an idea on a great general way to determine if a word should
be skipped. Determine the words to skip based on the symbols that
(almost) always surround the word.
For example when asked to check the following C++ code:
cout « "My age is: " « num « endl;
cout « "Next year I will be " « num + 1 « endl;
cout, num, and endl will all be skipped. "cout"
will be skipped because it is always preceded by a «. "num"
will be skipped because it is always preceded by a «. And "endl"
will be skipped because it is always between a « and a ;.
table, width cellspacing, cellpadding, tr, td will all be skipped
because they are always enclosed in "<>". Now of
course table and width would be marked as correct anyway however there
is no harm in skipping them.
So I was wondering if anyone on this list has any experience in writing
this sort of context recognition code or could give me some pointers
in the right direction.
This sort of word skipping will be very powerful if done right. I
imagine that it could replace specific spell checker modes for Tex,
Nroff, SGML etc because it will automatically be able to figure out
where it should skip words. It could also probably do a very good
job on programming languages code.
If you are interested in helping be out with this or just have general
comments about the idea please let me know.
Knud Haugaard Sørensen suggested this one. From his email on the Aspell
mailing list:
consider this examples.
a fone number. -> a phone number.
a fone dress. -> a fine dress.
the example illustrates that the right correction might depend on
the context of the word. So I suggest that you take a look on HMM
to solve this problem.
This might also provide a good base to include grammar correction
in aspell.
Have you thought of adding a function to aspell, that - when the personal
dictionary has grown significantly - sends the user's personal dictionary
to the maintainer of the corresponding aspell dictionary? (if the
user allows it)
It would be a very useful service to the dictionary maintainers, and
I think most users can see their benefit in it too.
And I replied:
Yes I have considered something like that but not for the personal
dictionaries but rather the replacement word list in order to get
better test data for http://aspell.sourceforge.net/test/. The
problem is I don't know of a good way to do this sense Aspell can
also be used as a library. It also is not a real high priority, especially
sense I would first need to learn how to send email within a C++ program.
While this is something I would like to do it is not a simple task.
The basic problem is that when tokenizing a string there is no good
way to keep phrases together. So the solution is to some how add special
conditions to certain words which will dictate which words can come
before/after it. Then there is also a problem of how to come up with
intelligent suggestions. What further complicates things is that many
applications send words to Aspell a word at a time. So even if Aspell
did support such a thing many applications that would use Aspell will
not. So, in order for this to work applications will need to send
text to Aspell a document or at least a sentence at a time. Unfortunately
the framework for doing this is not there yet. It will be once I finish
the filter interface. Another possible is to provide call back functions
in which Aspell will be able to request the previous or next word
on request. Yet again the framework for doing this is not there. Perhaps
sometime in the near future.