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Subsections

- B.1 Things that will be done real soon
- B.2 Things that need to be done
- B.3 Things that I would like to get done
- B.4 Things that will be done eventually
- B.5 Good ideas that are worth implementing
- B.6 Things that are not likely to get implemented
- B.7 Notes and Status of various items
  - B.7.1 Affix Compression
  - B.7.2 Extremely Large Dictionaries
  - B.7.3 General region skipping
  - B.7.4 Word skipping by context
  - B.7.5 Tablelise to_soundslike
  - B.7.6 Hidden Markov Model

# B. To Do

Words in bold indicate how you should refer to the item when discussing it with me or others.

# B.1 Things that will be done real soon

These items should get done within a release or two.

- Handle capitulation better when storing replacement pairs.
- Finish up support for detachable and multiple dictionaries, right now aspell will not work right with multiple replacement dictionaries.
- Totally rewrite the aspell international support. See `http://metalab.unc.edu/kevina/aspell/international/`for more information.
- Rework the aspell check function to provide support for using any number of filters which will be needed for international support.
- Namespace clean up. Chose a naming sceme for all of aspell functions and classes and stick to it.
- Write documentation for the library interface.
- Bring back the C interface library.

# B.2 Things that need to be done

Things items will eventually be implemented as I know they are important however I am not sure when they will get done.

- Add support for affix compression.
- Figure out a way for Aspell to work better with extremely large dictionaries.

# B.3 Things that I would like to get done

These items will eventually be implemented. I hope to have them all done before I move aspell to beta testing. They are in the approximate order of when they will get done.

# B.4 Things that will be done eventually

I plan on doing these things eventually. It is just a matter of getting around to it.

- Bring the suggest_ultra method back.

# B.5 Good ideas that are worth implementing

These items all sound like good ideas however I am not sure when I will get to implementing then if ever. If you are looking for a way to contribute picking up on one of these ideas would be a great way to start. They are presented in no particular order.

- Come up with a full screen terminal interface similar to Ispell's.
- Come up with a plug-in for gEdit the gnome text editor.
- Create a debian package for both the Aspell utility and the library.
- Create a RPM package for both the Aspell utility and the library.
- Change languages (and thus dictionaries) based on the information in the actual document.
- Come up with an HTML mode for spell checking.
- Come up with a TEX mode and a nroff mode for spell checking.
- Come up with a C mode, a C++ mode, a Perl mode, etc for spell checking.
- Come up with a mode that will skip words based on the symbols that (almost) always surround the word. (Word skipping by context)
- Create two server modes for Aspell. One that uses the DICT protocol and one that uses ispell -a method of communication of some arbitrary port.
- Improve the C interface and documentation.
- Come up with a Perl interface.
- Come up with thread safe personal dictionaries.
- Tablelise the to_soundslike method.
- Use the Hidden Markov Model to base the suggestions on not only the word itself but on the context around the word.

# B.6 Things that are not likely to get implemented

Theses ideas are not likely to get implemented any time soon.

- (None Yet)

# B.7 Notes and Status of various items

##
B.7.1 Affix Compression

Due to the current way my spell checker works implementing affix compression would be next to impossible. Nevertheless, I do realize that for some languages affix compression is very important.

So to solve this dilemma I plan on having two different modes of my spell checker: One with affix compression that does not use soundslike pairs (much like ispell) and one without affix compression that does use soundslike.

I plan to extract the affix manipulation code from Ispell with the help of an Ispell author. The tricky part would be getting this to getting this all to work properly at tun time bases on the dictionary used.

## B.7.2 Extremely Large Dictionaries

This problem extends back to the fact of the way words are index is Aspell. This problem will get resolved when I implanted the affix compression mode as only one index would be used.

## B.7.3 General region skipping

I want to implement this give other people an idea of how it should be done and because I am really sick of having to spell check through url and email address.

## B.7.4 Word skipping by context

This was posted on the Aspell mailing list on January 1, 1999:

I had an idea on a great general way to determine if a word should be skipped. Determine the words to skip based on the symbols that (almost) always surround the word.

For example when asked to check the following C++ code:

  `cout << "My age is: " << num << endl;
  cout << "Next year I will be " << num + 1 << endl;`

cout, num, and endl will all be skipped. "cout" will be skipped because it is always preceded by a <<. "num" will be skipped because it is always preceded by a <<. And "endl" will be skipped because it is always between a << and a ;.

Given the following html code.

  `<table width=50% cellspacing=0 cellpadding=1>
  <tr><td>One<td>Two<td>Three
  <tr><td>1<td>2<td>3
  </table>
  <table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=1>
  </table>`

table, width cellspacing, cellpadding, tr, td will all be skipped because they are always inclosed in "<>". Now of course table and width would be marked as correct anyway however there is no harm in skipping them.

So I was wondering if anyone on this list has any experience in writing this sort of context recognition code or could give me some pointers in the right direction.

This sort of word skipping will be very powerful if done right. I imagine that it could replace specific spell checker modes for Tex, Nroff, SGML etc because it will automatically be able to figure out where it should skip words. It could also probably do a very good job on programming languages code.

If you are interested in helping be out with this or just have general comments about the idea please let me know.

## B.7.5 Tablelise to_soundslike

Geoff Kuenning (one of the Ispell authors) gave me this idea. He suggest that I table-drive the conversion instead of hard wiring the code to encourage other people to come up with a to_soundslike method for their language. ``My experience with ispell leads me to believe that if we could give fairly explicit instructions about how to design a metaphone algorithm for a language, there are people out there who are eager to do the work.''

This sounds like a good idea to and it is something I hope to implement eventually as it would surely beat my current crude method of just deleting all the values for languages without a customized to_soundslike method for the language.

## B.7.6 Hidden Markov Model

Knud Haugaard Sørensen suggested this one. From his email on the Aspell mailing list:

> consider this examples.

> a fone number. -> a phone number.
> a fone dress. -> a fine dress.

> the example illustrates that the right corection might depend on the context of the word. So I suggest that you take a look on HMM to solve this problem.

> This might also provide a good base to include gramma correction in aspell.

> see this link `http://www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/HLTsurvey/ch1node7.html`

I think it is a great idea. However unfortunately it will probably be very complicated to implement. Perhaps in the far future...

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