In May [1] I wrote about the status of Finnish spellchecking, and plans about creating a WWW application for editing spellchecking dictionaries. The status of Finnish spellchecking is currently quite good, and our work is now concentrating around the WWW application for maintaining and further developing the vocabulary.
A test version of the WWW application "Joukahainen" is now available at http://joukahainen.lokalisointi.org/ While the current version more or less works, it is still unfinished and unfortunately only available in Finnish and most of the interesting features require an user account to be able to test them, so I do not expect that test installation to be of much use for most of the readers on this list. But I have now reached the point where it would be interesting to internationalise the application to be usable for other languages as well. I expect to be able to do this by the end of this month. This means that I will be translating the application to English and will replace the Finnish data with the contents from a current English hunspell dictionary file. If there are any language teams that are already interested in using this application for maintaining their dictionaries, I can provide some instructions on what to do and where to start any time, just ask. The current feature set includes a word editor that can be used to add string attributes, flags and alternative spellings to any words. All edit actions are logged and comments can be added in similar way than in typical Bugzilla installations (the process is just a little less complicated). Words can be added, either manually or by first storing a list of candidate words in the database which will be used to pre-fill the word entry form (I have received some test material from the language recognising web crawler by Kevin Scannell and this feature is build around that kind of data). Once the data is in the database, creating a spellchecking dictionary can be done by just writing an exporter for the particular spellchecker. For hunspell this will be quite easy. For use in languages that only need simple affix flags associated with each word this system may seem overly complex. I will try to make it easy to use in such cases as well. The main benefit of the system is that it allows distributed editing of the word list in a way that records the editing history and allow anyone to review the changes. I can later write more when things start to get ready and I have something working to show in English as well. Harri [1] http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=1806 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
