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Subject: Re: compound patch 2.0, affix file reading bug
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Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 15:43:14 +0100
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Hi,

I looked also two german dictionaries. Indeed, none of them use
compounding possibilities of ispell.
I ``googlized'' a little about german compounds:

``It is possible to construct participial adjectives of almost any
length, but they are little used in contemporary German, and
regarded now as poor style. As in English, very long words are not
always to be taken too seriously. On the author's last visit to
Germany, the longest word he had to struggle with was
Nasenspitzenwurzelentzündung It means `inflammation of the root of
the tip of the nose', and comes from a cautionary tale for children.''
(http://snowball.sourceforge.net/texts/germanic.html,
snowball is a well-documented root word generator.)

I found an interesting article about german compound words
(http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/fetter98detection.html)
``There are basically two types of compounds: semantic and orthographic.
In semantic compounds, wich tend to
be written together in many languages, the semantic content of the
compound cannot be derived from the semantic
content of its constituent parts, e.g. jellyfish, and bathroom. In
orthographic  compounds, on other hand, the
constituent parts retain their original semantic content, e.g. `coffee
break,' which in German is written `Kaffeepause'
because German orthography requires both types of compounds to be
written together.''

In Hungarian (along of German influence) compounds are very frequent,
because Hungarian orthorgraphy also orders
the orthographic compounding. I can't collect these thousands of words,
because the list will never be complete.
Fortunately, the hungarian compounding is simpler, than the german's.
Namely, there is no inner affix formation, and
the compounding is possible primarily with nouns (The Hungarian
Ispell/MySpell use the compoundflag for nouns only).

***

When the inner affix formation is allowed too, this caused an another
Hungarian specific problem:
The Hungarian language is a agglutinative language (like Finnish,
Turkish, Japan, Basque, etc.),
i.e. Hungarian has many suffixes, and possible inflecting a word with
suffix longer.
For example:
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeitekért
is a correct Hungarian word.

szent  = saint
szentség = sainthood
szentségtelen = ``sainthoodless''
megszentségtelenít = desecrate
megszentségteleníthet = could desecrate
megszentségteleníthetetlen = couldn't desecrate (adjective)
megszentségteleníthetetlenség = inability of desecrating (noun)
megszentségteleníthetetlensége = his inability of desecrating
megszentségteleníthetetlenségei = his inabilities of desecrating
(nominative)
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeitek = they inabilities of desecrating
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeitekért = for they inabilities of
desecrating

(Another, but meaningless record:
elkáposztástalaníthatatlanságoskodásaitokért,
affixes: el-káposztá-s-talan-ít-hat-atlan-ság-os-kod-ás-a-i-tok-ért)

Combinating the suffixes caused many word form: Hungarian has min. 10^7,
or more in spoken language.
Hence there is large probability, that a misspelled word is right,
especially when the inner affix formation is
allowed in compounds.

For example, my first test was ``successful'':
I wrote ``szerelesen'' instead of ``szerelmesen''
szerelmesen = amorously
szerelesen is meaningless, but Ispell allows with -C flag, or MySpell
with inner affix formation, than
szere+lesen
szere = his material/agent
lesen = in lurking-place

I looked Finnish dictionary, it allows every compounds with inner
affixes (compound on).
I think, MySpell needs mimic Ispell controlled compounds option (that I
tried),
AND -C (or compound on) Ispell option.

IMHO the word position doesn't matter in compounds, or rather too
difficult to classify the words
among this aspect.
I think, 3 possible compound formations are enough:

PO=prefix only, R=root only, SO = suffix only, PS= prefix and suffix, *
= iteration

1 PO R* SO (this equivalent of Ispell controlled compound formation)
2 PO PO* PS  (for Hungarian)
3 PS PS* PS  (this equivalent of Ispell compound on formation, or
Ispell's -C flag)

Sorry, I can't write more now.
Thanks for your ideas.

Best regards

Laci




"Kevin B. Hendricks" <kevin.hendricks@sympatico.ca> irta:

> Hi,
>
> > > So why don't we just allow all prefixes and suffixes on every word
> in
> > > the
> > > combination word (which is what I am doing now).  Why restrict the
> > > last
> > > word to have suffixes only?
> >
> > Because we will accept _many_ bad words, those seems (bad) compound
> > word!
> > Ispell also allows suffixes only on the last subword in a compound
> word.
> > In Ispell there are a special in-compound affix flag marker (~) for
> > German language.
> >
> > I will look the German affix problem too...
>
> Okay I looked at 4 different ispell German dictionaries and none
> turned on
> compound word support in ispell.  They just added the most common of
> them
> to the wordlist as unique words (which they are) and created a few
> prefixes and a few suffixes to handle some common pairings.
>
> This is most technically correct since there are capitalization issues
> when combining words in German.
>
> So any time we allow compound words we are making the distinct choice
> that
> allowing some bad words through is better since the size of the
> dictionary
> otherwise would be simply too big.
>
> Is this really true in Hungarian?  It does not seem to be that true in
> German at all once you handle the most common pairings with prefixes
> and
> suffixes.
>
> Perhaps a better solution would be to introduce 3 flags for compound
> words:
>
> COMPOUND_BEGIN   ~
> COMPOUND_MIDDLE +
> COMPOUND_END  #
>
> And then limit it to root words and prefixes at the beginning, and
> only
> the last word with just suffixes (no prefixes).  In addition with an
> integer "level" parameter to the compound_check we would know if we
> were
> checking a beginning, middle, or end word and make sure the correct
> flag
> exists for the word to be a the beginning, or somewhere in the middle,
> or
> at the end of the compound word.
>
> Otherwise we will simply be allowing too many bad words through which
> just
> doens't make sense to me.
>
> I just don't know enough about German or Hungarian to know if this
> makes
> sense.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Kevin
>
>
>
>




