Re: Aspell Corba integration for Gnome

[Kevin Atkinson]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 
> Has anyone considerd making a aspell corba servelet for Gnome?
> I've been thinking about it, and I'd like to get some feedback before
> trying it myself (and make sure no one else is doing it).

I will be more than happy to support one.  I would do it myself except I
don't have time to learn about how Corba works.

> Here's how I've been thinking:
> ORBit will run a servlet on demand. One copy per user. It will manage it's
> config files and there would be a capplet for controling it (pointing it to
> dictionary files, and configing suggestion ranking algs).

You might want to have a single server so that they can all use the same
main word list.

> The applet will send requests like this:
> checkspelling(language, "This is a complete sentence of text.", position)
> Position would be the word we are intrested in checking. The reason for
> sending the complete sentence is for the future possibility of context
> sensitive suggestion ranking.

In the future Aspell will support spell checking algorithms which will
skip words based on there context and frequency of occurrence.  However
in order for this to work a pre scan of the entire document will be
nesseary.  See the message with a subject of "Word skipping by context"
for more information.

> This would return a true/false and a preranked list of suggestions. The app
> should also be able to return which suggestion was picked if any to assist
> the suggestion alg. Has anyone looked into having aspell classify
> misspelling for userdependent mistake-mode modeling? (i.e. I frequently
> transpose two characters, and aspell would do better for me to rank such
> suggestions higher).

That's an interesting idea.  However in practices it might be difficult
to implement.

> Also, checkspelling(language, "This is another complete sentence of text.")
> when the position is omitted we can check the whole sentence and return a
> list of misspelled words and their suggestions.

The misspelling should also have a position number attached to so that
the application knows where the misspelled word is located in the
sentence without having to do any extra work.

> I was thinking there should perhaps be some functions to drop
> checkspelling(s) into a queue that will be checked in a low priority
> background process. The checker can then send messages back to the
> application as it checked entries in a fifo manner. This would be very
> useful for word processors which do misspell underlining.

That would defiantly be a good idea.

> This servelet would of course maintain a cache of correct words, misspelled
> words and suggestions. It might also be useful to keep an indexed mini
> dictionarry in memory of the most commonly used words (who's size could be
> determined by free memory/user prefrence and contence could be a combo of
> pre-built static and dynammically generated user usage).

Perhaps, however with modern computers I don't think a mini dictionary
would do any real good except it might speed up checking a bit.

> Ideally, the interface would be as generic as possible and the application
> could ask gnome for what checker to use. This would allow other compeating
> checkers if any evolved.
> I'd also like to know if there has been any work on open source grammer
> checkers? I'd like to make the spell checker as simmlar to a grammer
> checker interface as possible.

I don't know of any Open Source grammar checkers.  If any one is
interested in developing one The Link Grammar Parser
(http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/) would be a good place to start.

> Thanks for any advice.

-- 
Kevin Atkinson
address@hidden
http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/