From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2017 19:25:15 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from
 `quotes'
In-Reply-To: <201711230105.vAN15NI6026629@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
References: <201711230105.vAN15NI6026629@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
Message-ID: <AD06A799-A27C-4969-B2AD-33AB78518B91@bitblocks.com>

On Nov 22, 2017, at 5:05 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> 
> Steve's program was good, but the dictionary isn't an ideal source
> for real text, which abounds in proper names and terms of art.
> It also has a lot of rare words that don't pull their weight in
> a spell checker, and some attractive nuisances, especially obscure
> short words from Scots, botany, etc, which are more likely to
> arise in everyday text as typos than by intent. Given the basic
> success of Steve's program, I undertook to make a more useful
> spelling list, along with more vigorous affix stripping (and a
> stop list to avert associated traps, e.g. "presenation" =
> pre+senate+ion"). That has been described in Bentley's "Programming
> Pearls" and in http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/spell.pdf.

This is quite interesting to me. A while ago I looked into building a spell
checker for Gujarati (a Sanskrit based language) and found it to be a
complicated affair -- words can have multiple suffixes since the Guj.
equivalents of from/to/in/ etc prepositions are tacked on at the end of
a word. But the same endings can also appear in normal words. And
there are other complications.... Even though the language is phonetic,
mistakes of using the wrong form of long/short vowel signs are common.
After reading your paper I am tempted to revive the effort.