PlusPack, Dictionaries, Phonemes and Russian

["Ivan Tugoy" <address@hidden>]

Hello,

1. Dictionary Compiler.

A bug with the dictionary compiler, which was discussed a few days earlier
appeared to survive the last fix somehow, since the dictionary compiler
still doesn't show itself when I start it on Windows 98, despite the
installation succeed without hang this time. Temporarily I have left the
idea to compile dictionaries under Win98 and switched this task to Win2k.

There were no problem and a compiler started successfully. I must admit that
you did a great job with compiler. It's fast and it decreases a size even
better then WinZip. So Michael, when you finish writing a speller, you can
make a new extremely competitive archiver :-)

2. New Dictionaries.

I could compile two Russian dictionaries using the word lists, which I had
told you about in one of my previous messages. They are:
 * russian.adm -- ~147 000 words (435 Kb)
   http://addict.ghcube.com/russian.zip
 * ru_phys.adm -- ~ 16 000 words ( 86 Kb)
   http://addict.ghcube.com/ru_phys.zip
The first one contains a general vocabulary and the second is loaded with
physics and math words.

3. Phonetic bug.

When I compiled these dictionaries and tryed to test their efficiency, a
brand-new bug crop out. It is vividly depicted at
http://addict.ghcube.com/phonetic_bug.gif. As you can see the spelling
dialog partly appears and doesn't react on any user's actions, neither does
the host application. The system monitor shows 100% CPU load. I assumed that
spell checker is unable to form a suggestions list and some kind of infinite
loop takes place.

I was consecutively enabling/disabling different features until I turned
phonetic suggestions off. (I had doubts this could work for Russian anyway)
The problem disappeared. The decrease of PhoneticDepth, PhoneticDivisor and
PhoneticMaxDistance settings to 1, 1 and 2 correspondingly solves the
problem as well, but the delay of suggestion list is still noticeable.

4. Reliability Testing.

I only tested russian.adm and found that it is able to satisfy the average
spelling needs, although several problems with geographical titles, like
names of countries or rivers were obvious. The other main problem deals with
the notorious forms of words, the overwhelming majority of which does
present in a dictionary while there are some forms that were not included.

It leads to the situation, when a word, being deliberately good, is
recognized as misspelled and a checker suggests replacing it with one of
other forms of a same word. But this problem is not too dramatic since there
were not many cases of this kind. Even MS Word tends to have this problem,
in less extent.

5. Authorship.

As I mentioned earlier, a person who "keeps rolling" these dictionaries is
Lev Melnikovsky. He kindly allowed it to be freely used in any way. In
accompanying note he says: "Feel free to copy, use, distribute, abuse or
delete this dictionary in any way you wish". Thanks, did just that :-) But
still, in the readme.txt file with the dictionary, it would be better to
mention the original word list, which the dictionary is based on. It will
help to avoid confusion that our company developed the whole stuff.

--
Sincerely,
Ivan Tugoy <mailto:address@hidden>,
Lucky Tesseract Group <http://www.ghcube.com>.