[Aspell-user] Extending Dictionaries

[Sebastian Schleehauf]

Hello Kevin,

I think that dictionaries are of quite good quality, but many technical 
terms are missing (e.g. physics related stuff ). I can only state this 
for the de dictionary. I was adding many words to my dictionary, but 
this is a rather slow process and I am not sure how to submit my additions.
After thinking about it for a while it might be a good idea to join 
forces with wikipedia /  wiktionary. To me it looks like they have quite 
a lot of words in their Database and their explanations could be 
dismissed for spell checking. If this step can be done there would be 
more people working on the dictionaries and checking each others work...
I am not sure about the technical issues, but it can't be to hard I 
guess. There are some other point which might be of interest:

Since they have other information like noun, verb ... this might be a 
startingpoint for grammer checking if you plan on doing this in the future.

If the translations they offer are used as well this would be an 
interesting step in the direction of multi-dictionary support since 
there could an new kind of misspelling like wrong language denoted with 
a different color.
They have an extra field for plural which could be included since this 
is missing in many cases for the current dict I am using, but I don't 
think plurals should be different words.
Additionally this might be a huge gain for wikipedia since they can 
implement spell checking on their side and not leave it to the browser 
of the user improving their quality... so this is why I think they might 
put some efforts in it too.

Additionally the words of project Gutenberg could be included to 
maintain quality only words that have been used in more than n times in 
 n different articles.

I know that this automation of the dictionary creation process might 
introduce errors and reduce quality but maybe the current maintainers of 
the dicts are willing to put some time in it to double check.
An other thing I was thinking about was to get dictionary creation a 
more dynamic process. I am not sure if there is a way to implement what 
I am doing when I am not sure of the spelling os a certain word: I put 
it in google and whichever spelling gets more hits is the correct 
one...I don't know how you would determine which words are the same and 
which words just have the same characters.


Regards,
Sebastian

PS: I am not sure if this belongs in the user mailing list, if not let 
me know that I can subscribe to whichever list it belongs to.