Re: [aspell-devel] Re: regarding autocomplete for hindi words

[Jose Da Silva]

On May 19, 2006 12:48 am, Gora Mohanty wrote:
> --- Jose Da Silva <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On May 18, 2006 02:18 am, gm ravi sastry wrote:

> [...]
>
> It is definitely worth thinking about how to implement word
> completion. While I have not pondered this much, using aspell
> suggestions is a good idea. However, a specialized dictionary might
> be needed as the problem domains of spellchecking and word-completion
> are slightly different.

www.openoffice.org offers a form of autocompletion which may give you 
some possible ideas. Openoffice 2.0 has become LGPL which makes it 
compatible with Aspell's LGPL.  http://www.openoffice.org/license.html

...but speaking of license compatibility, that might not be a 
consideration. Autocompletion isn't spellchecking, so maybe it is best 
to keep it separate from aspell in the same manner that aspell is not a 
wordprocessor, but a wordprocessor still uses aspell.

As you say, autocomplete and spellchecking are similar, yet different.

> [...]
>
> If you want to start with Indian languages, we might be able to
> offer some help. I would suggest using the Python scripting language
> to test out the implementation. I have some Python bindings for
> aspell that I really should clean up and release, and can help you
> get started. At some later point of time, the Python scripts can be
> reimplemented in C, if additional speed turns out to be needed. The
> aspell API lets you get a list of suggestions for a partially spelled
> word. The trick is to interpret these in a manner useful to the user,
> and to do it quickly.

In terms of your autocomplete, you may want to make use of the recently 
submitted patch by Ethan Bradford seen here that gives "scoring" for 
suggestions:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1489981&group_id=245&atid=300245

If you can add your autocomplete to some existing project, you will make 
that project more versatile. If you can make it usable with more than 
one language, that would be even better.

Hope these suggestions helped.