Re: Arabic Support For Aspell

[Mohammed Elzubeir <elzubeir at arabeyes dot org>]

On Sat, 2004-04-17 at 13:21, Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> Hi, I am contacting you because you are the author of Duali.
> 
> Would you be interested in working with be to add support for Arabic to 
> Aspell (http://aspell.net)?
> 

Very interested. It was my original intention to do it this way, but I
have received very little feedback during my initial attempts to
establish contact and so I have abandoned that to work on Duali.

> I believe Aspell can handle it now, however, I am not sure.  The Arabic 
> encoding in Unicode is very complicated and I do not understand all the 
> issues involved.  Would you be willing to explain to be what I need to 
> know about the encoding for spell checking.  In particular should I expect 
> the "Arabic Presentation Forms" to be used?  Should words in the 
> dictionary be encoded with the presentation forms? Etc.

Presentation forms are just what they say they are, for visual
presentation. So, they would not be used. The dictionary is encoded in
UTF-8 format (at least that's what I use for Duali). 

> 
> Once we establish that Aspell can indeed handle Arabic the next thing to do 
> is to convert the "prefixes, suffixes, etc" into an affix file.
> 

You may want to have a look at the lexicon class [1] in CVS. Those are
the main methods performed in Duali.

> If you rather spend your effort working on Duali I fully understand.  

Our (Arabeyes') goal (and mine) are to make Arabic spell checking
available to as big of an audience as possible. I believe adding it to
aspell would make it more reachable. Having said that, I don't plan to
completely abandon Duali itself, but would be more than happy to
actively contribute to Arabic spell checking in aspell.

P.S. Please do contact me via the 'developer' [2] list as some people
may be interested to know about such issues.

Regards,
Mohammed Elzubeir

[1] http://cvs.arabeyes.org/viewcvs/projects/duali/src/lexicon.cc
[2] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/developer