Duali Status

[Ahmad Khalifa <ahmad at khalifa dot ws>]

Salam all,

I've been looking at duali's code. M.elzubeir wrote some very nice
READMEs that seemed to help a lot. The READMEs mention that python-duali
is a working implementation. The C version however is mentioned as
incomplete and seems to be much more complicated than the python
implementation.

As I didnt pay much attention back in school to arabic classes, Im
having a very difficult time getting along. The C implementation is
incomplete and would be very difficult for me to continue in its
development, as I wont know what its missing untill I reverse engineer 
all the code and. Porting the python version from scratch would be much
easier, which brings us to the question...
Do we implement duali in C as a standalone client, or as a MySpell
dictionary (OpenOffice's spellchecker) if possible ? which brings us to
the next question...
Is it possible to convert duali's dictionary data (The buckwalter
dataset !!!) to MySpell's affix format dictionary ?

To sum up, I need help on these topics. M.Elzubeir your thoughts would
be invaluable here :)

- To re-port from scratch, or not to re-port from scratch
- Port as a MySpell dictionary ? or Aspell ? or Standalone
  spellchecker ?
- Can the current dictionary be converted to MySpell's affix format
  dictionary ?? (Im still looking into this one)
- How complete is the current dictionary dataset ?

Any other thoughts, comments would be really helpfull at this point.


ak.