Re: [aspell-user] Aspell Arabic support

[Kevin Atkinson <kevin at atkinson dot dhs dot org>]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Moe Elzubeir wrote:

> I have been trying to contact Kevin Atkinson on various email addresses
> (including the sourceforge AND dhs.org accounts), but have not received
> a single response. I hope that someone on this list may either be able
> to answer my questions, or Kevin would actually receive this.

Sorry for not responding.  When people tend to ask hard questions I tend
to mark the post as important with the hope I will get back to it.
Unfortunately I don't always.  BTW, I prefer these type of things get
posted to the mailing list as it will create a public recorded of our
conversation.

> Using 8-bit characters internally as far Arabic is concerned is not a
> problem, although you would gain a lot more accuracy by considering
> double-width characters.

How is that?

> I do NOT have a sample list of words as of yet, and am more interested
> in the current engine's flexibility and its ability to adapt to the
> Arabic language.
>
> Arabic, for those who don't know, does not only expect letters to be
> added to its end, but root verbs do have insertions in the front, middle
> and end (prefix, middle, suffix). This adds a whole lot of complexity
> that I am not sure is easily integrated with the current pspell library.

Are you talking in terms of affix compression?

> I am willing to invest my time and energy on adding those features, but
> would appreciate some pointers and any help I can get. Unfortunately,
> for the past few months, not a SINGLE email I have sent (or any of my
> colleagues) have been replied to. I am not sure whether the error is on
> our side, or our messages simply don't get to their intended audience.

OK. You got my attention ;)

I am (unfortunately) the sole developer of Aspell.

The current released version of Aspell/Pspell is now dead as far as
development is concerned all of the new development is talking please on
the "New Aspell" which can be found at http://aspell.net/.  Browse the
announcement archive for more information as I have not set up a real web
page yet and what is currently there is not up to date.

---
http://kevin.atkinson.dhs.org