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hunspell(4) hunspell(4)
NAME
hunspell - format of Hunspell dictionaries and affix files
DESCRIPTION
Hunspell(1) requires two files to define the language that it is spell checking. The first file is a dictionary contain-
ing words for the language, and the second is an "affix" file that defines the meaning of special flags in the dictio-
nary.
A dictionary file (*.dic) contains a list of words, one per line. The first line of the dictionaries (except personal
dictionaries) contains the approximate word count (for optimal hash memory size). Each word may optionally be followed by
a slash ("/") and one or more flags, which represents affixes or special attributes. Dictionary words can contain also
slashes with the "" syntax. Default flag format is a single (usually alphabetic) character. After the dictionary words
there are also optional fields separated by tabulators or spaces (spaces only work as morphological field separators, if
they are followed by morphological field ids, see also Optional data fields).
Personal dictionaries are simple word lists. Asterisk at the first character position signs prohibition. A second word
separated by a slash sets the affixation.
foo
Foo/Simpson
*bar
In this example, "foo" and "Foo" are personal words, plus Foo will be recognized with affixes of Simpson (Foo's etc.) and
bar is a forbidden word.
An affix file (*.aff) may contain a lot of optional attributes. For example, SET is used for setting the character
encodings of affixes and dictionary files. TRY sets the change characters for suggestions. REP sets a replacement table
for multiple character corrections in suggestion mode. PFX and SFX defines prefix and suffix classes named with affix
flags.
The following affix file example defines UTF-8 character encoding. `TRY' suggestions differ from the bad word with an
English letter or an apostrophe. With these REP definitions, Hunspell can suggest the right word form, when the mis-
spelled word contains f instead of ph and vice versa.
SET UTF-8
TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ'
REP 2
REP f ph
REP ph f
PFX A Y 1
PFX A 0 re .
SFX B Y 2
SFX B 0 ed [^y]
SFX B y ied y
There are two affix classes in the dictionary. Class A defines a `re-' prefix. Class B defines two `-ed' suffixes. First
suffix can be added to a word if the last character of the word isn't `y'. Second suffix can be added to the words ter-
minated with an `y'. (See later.) The following dictionary file uses these affix classes.
3
hello
try/B
work/AB
All accepted words with this dictionary: "hello", "try", "tried", "work", "worked", "rework", "reworked".
GENERAL OPTIONS
Hunspell source distribution contains more than 80 examples for option usage.
SET encoding
Set character encoding of words and morphemes in affix and dictionary files. Possible values: UTF-8, ISO8859-1 -
ISO8859-10, ISO8859-13 - ISO8859-15, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, microsoft-cp1251, ISCII-DEVANAGARI.
FLAG value
Set flag type. Default type is the extended ASCII (8-bit) character. `UTF-8' parameter sets UTF-8 encoded Unicode
character flags. The `long' value sets the double extended ASCII character flag type, the `num' sets the decimal
number flag type. Decimal flags numbered from 1 to 65000, and in flag fields are separated by comma. BUG: UTF-8
flag type doesn't work on ARM platform.
COMPLEXPREFIXES
Set twofold prefix stripping (but single suffix stripping) for agglutinative languages with right-to-left writing
system.
LANG langcode
Set language code. In Hunspell may be language specific codes enabled by LANG code. At present there are az_AZ,
hu_HU, tr_TR specific codes in Hunspell (see the source code).
IGNORE characters
Ignore characters from dictionary words, affixes and input words. Useful for optional characters, as Arabic dia-
critical marks (Harakat).
AF number_of_flag_vector_aliases
AF flag_vector
Hunspell can substitute affix flag sets with ordinal numbers in affix rules (alias compression, see makealias
tool). First example with alias compression:
3
hello
try/1
work/2
AF definitions in the affix file:
SET UTF-8
TRY esianrtolcdugmphbyfvkwzESIANRTOLCDUGMPHBYFVKWZ'
AF 2
AF A
AF AB
It is equivalent of the following dic file:
3
hello
try/A
work/AB
See also tests/alias* examples of the source distribution.
Note: If affix file contains the FLAG parameter, define it before the AF definitions.
Note II: Use makealias utility in Hunspell distribution to compress aff and dic files.
AM number_of_morphological_aliases
AM morphological_fields
Hunspell can substitute also morphological data with ordinal numbers in affix rules (alias compression). See
tests/alias* examples.
OPTIONS FOR SUGGESTION
Suggestion parameters can optimize the default n-gram, character swap and deletion suggestions of Hunspell. REP is sug-
gested to fix the typical and especially bad language specific bugs, because the REP suggestions have the highest prior-
ity in the suggestion list. PHONE is for languages with not pronunciation based orthography.
KEY characters_separated_by_vertical_line_optionally
Hunspell searches and suggests words with one different character replaced by a neighbor KEY character. Not neigh-
bor characters in KEY string separated by vertical line characters. Suggested KEY parameters for QWERTY and Dvo-
rak keyboard layouts:
KEY qwertyuiop|asdfghjkl|zxcvbnm
KEY pyfgcrl|aeouidhtns|qjkxbmwvz
Using the first QWERTY layout, Hunspell suggests "nude" and "node" for "*nide". A character may have more neighbors, too:
KEY qwertzuop|yxcvbnm|qaw|say|wse|dsx|sy|edr|fdc|dx|rft|gfv|fc|tgz|hgb|gv|zhu|jhn|hb|uji|kjm|jn|iko|lkm
TRY characters
Hunspell can suggest right word forms, when they differ from the bad input word by one TRY character. The parame-
ter of TRY is case sensitive.
NOSUGGEST flag
Words signed with NOSUGGEST flag are not suggested. Proposed flag for vulgar and obscene words (see also SUBSTAN-
DARD).
MAXNGRAMSUGS num
Set number of n-gram suggestions. Value 0 switches off the n-gram suggestions.
NOSPLITSUGS
Disable split-word suggestions.
SUGSWITHDOTS
Add dot(s) to suggestions, if input word terminates in dot(s). (Not for OpenOffice.org dictionaries, because
OpenOffice.org has an automatic dot expansion mechanism.)
REP number_of_replacement_definitions
REP what replacement
We can define language-dependent phonetic information in the affix file (.aff) by a replacement table. First REP
is the header of this table and one or more REP data line are following it. With this table, Hunspell can suggest
the right forms for the typical faults of spelling when the incorrect form differs by more, than 1 letter from the
right form. For example a possible English replacement table definition to handle misspelled consonants:
REP 8
REP f ph
REP ph f
REP f gh
REP gh f
REP j dg
REP dg j
REP k ch
REP ch k
Note I: It's very useful to define replacements for the most typical one-character mistakes, too: with REP you can add
higher priority to a subset of the TRY suggestions (suggestion list begins with the REP suggestions).
Note II: Suggesting separated words by REP, you can specify a space with an underline:
REP 1
REP alot a_lot
Note III: Replacement table can be used for a stricter compound word checking (forbidding generated compound words, if
they are also simple words with typical fault, see CHECKCOMPOUNDREP).
MAP number_of_map_definitions
MAP string_of_related_chars_or_parenthesized_character_sequences
We can define language-dependent information on characters and character sequences that should be considered
related (i.e. nearer than other chars not in the set) in the affix file (.aff) by a map table. With this table,
Hunspell can suggest the right forms for words, which incorrectly choose the wrong letter or letter groups from a
related set more than once in a word (see REP).
For example a possible mapping could be for the German umlauted u versus the regular u; the word Fruhstuck really
should be written with umlauted u's and not regular ones
MAP 1
MAP uu
Use parenthesized groups for character sequences (eg. for composed Unicode characters):
MAP 3
MAP B(ss) (character sequence)
MAP (fi) ("fi" compatibility characters for Unicode fi ligature)
MAP (o)o (composed Unicode character: o with bottom dot)
PHONE number_of_phone_definitions
PHONE what replacement
PHONE uses a table-driven phonetic transcription algorithm borrowed from Aspell. It is useful for languages with
not pronunciation based orthography. You can add a full alphabet conversion and other rules for conversion of spe-
cial letter sequences. For detailed documentation see http://aspell.net/man-html/Phonetic-Code.html. Note: Multi-
byte UTF-8 characters have not worked with bracket expression yet. Dash expression has signed bytes and not UTF-8
characters yet.
OPTIONS FOR COMPOUNDING
BREAK number_of_break_definitions
BREAK character_or_character_sequence
Define new break points for breaking words and checking word parts separately. Use ^ and $ to delete characters at
end and start of the word. Rationale: useful for compounding with joining character or strings (for example,
hyphen in English and German or hyphen and n-dash in Hungarian). Dashes are often bad break points for tokeniza-
tion, because compounds with dashes may contain not valid parts, too.) With BREAK, Hunspell can check both side
of these compounds, breaking the words at dashes and n-dashes:
BREAK 2
BREAK -
BREAK -- # n-dash
Breaking are recursive, so foo-bar, bar-foo and foo-foo--bar-bar would be valid compounds. Note: The default word break
of Hunspell is equivalent of the following BREAK definition:
BREAK 3
BREAK -
BREAK ^-
BREAK -$
Hunspell doesn't accept the "-word" and "word-" forms by this BREAK definition:
BREAK 1
BREAK -
W Note II: COMPOUNDRULE is better (or will be better) for handling dashes and other compound joining characters or char-
acter strings. Use BREAK, if you want check words with dashes or other joining characters and there is no time or possi-
bility to describe precise compound rules with COMPOUNDRULE (COMPOUNDRULE has handled only the last suffixation of the
compound word yet).
Note III: For command line spell checking of words with extra characters, set WORDCHARS parameters: WORDCHARS --- (see
tests/break.*) example
COMPOUNDRULE number_of_compound_definitions
COMPOUNDRULE compound_pattern
Define custom compound patterns with a regex-like syntax. The first COMPOUNDRULE is a header with the number of
the following COMPOUNDRULE definitions. Compound patterns consist compound flags, parentheses, star and question
mark meta characters. A flag followed by a `*' matches a word sequence of 0 or more matches of words signed with
this compound flag. A flag followed by a `?' matches a word sequence of 0 or 1 matches of a word signed with this
compound flag. See tests/compound*.* examples.
Note: en_US dictionary of OpenOffice.org uses COMPOUNDRULE for ordinal number recognition (1st, 2nd, 11th, 12th,
22nd, 112th, 1000122nd etc.).
Note II: In the case of long and numerical flag types use only parenthesized flags: (1500)*(2000)?
Note III: COMPOUNDRULE flags haven't been compatible with the COMPOUNDFLAG, COMPOUNDBEGIN, etc. compound flags yet
(use these flags on different words).
COMPOUNDMIN num
Minimum length of words in compound words. Default value is 3 letters.
COMPOUNDFLAG flag
Words signed with COMPOUNDFLAG may be in compound words (except when word shorter than COMPOUNDMIN). Affixes with
COMPOUNDFLAG also permits compounding of affixed words.
COMPOUNDBEGIN flag
Words signed with COMPOUNDBEGIN (or with a signed affix) may be first elements in compound words.
COMPOUNDLAST flag
Words signed with COMPOUNDLAST (or with a signed affix) may be last elements in compound words.
COMPOUNDMIDDLE flag
Words signed with COMPOUNDMIDDLE (or with a signed affix) may be middle elements in compound words.
ONLYINCOMPOUND flag
Suffixes signed with ONLYINCOMPOUND flag may be only inside of compounds (Fuge-elements in German, fogemorphemes
in Swedish). ONLYINCOMPOUND flag works also with words (see tests/onlyincompound.*).
COMPOUNDPERMITFLAG flag
Prefixes are allowed at the beginning of compounds, suffixes are allowed at the end of compounds by default.
Affixes with COMPOUNDPERMITFLAG may be inside of compounds.
COMPOUNDFORBIDFLAG flag
Suffixes with this flag forbid compounding of the affixed word.
COMPOUNDROOT flag
COMPOUNDROOT flag signs the compounds in the dictionary (Now it is used only in the Hungarian language specific
code).
COMPOUNDWORDMAX number
Set maximum word count in a compound word. (Default is unlimited.)
CHECKCOMPOUNDDUP
Forbid word duplication in compounds (e.g. foofoo).
CHECKCOMPOUNDREP
Forbid compounding, if the (usually bad) compound word may be a non compound word with a REP fault. Useful for
languages with `compound friendly' orthography.
CHECKCOMPOUNDCASE
Forbid upper case characters at word bound in compounds.
CHECKCOMPOUNDTRIPLE
Forbid compounding, if compound word contains triple repeating letters (e.g. foo|ox or xo|oof). Bug: missing
multi-byte character support in UTF-8 encoding (works only for 7-bit ASCII characters).
SIMPLIFIEDTRIPLE
Allow simplified 2-letter forms of the compounds forbidden by CHECKCOMPOUNDTRIPLE. It's useful for Swedish and
Norwegian (and for the old German orthography: Schiff|fahrt -> Schiffahrt).
CHECKCOMPOUNDPATTERN number_of_checkcompoundpattern_definitions
CHECKCOMPOUNDPATTERN endchars[/flag] beginchars[/flag] [replacement]
Forbid compounding, if the first word in the compound ends with endchars, and next word begins with beginchars and
(optionally) they have the requested flags. The optional replacement parameter allows simplified compound form.
Note: COMPOUNDMIN doesn't work correctly with the compound word alternation, so it may need to set COMPOUNDMIN to
lower value.
COMPOUNDSYLLABLE max_syllable vowels
Need for special compounding rules in Hungarian. First parameter is the maximum syllable number, that may be in a
compound, if words in compounds are more than COMPOUNDWORDMAX. Second parameter is the list of vowels (for calcu-
lating syllables).
SYLLABLENUM flags
Need for special compounding rules in Hungarian.
OPTIONS FOR AFFIX CREATION
PFX flag cross_product number
PFX flag stripping prefix [condition [morphological_fields...]]
SFX flag cross_product number
SFX flag stripping suffix [condition [morphological_fields...]]
An affix is either a prefix or a suffix attached to root words to make other words. We can define affix classes
with arbitrary number affix rules. Affix classes are signed with affix flags. The first line of an affix class
definition is the header. The fields of an affix class header:
(0) Option name (PFX or SFX)
(1) Flag (name of the affix class)
(2) Cross product (permission to combine prefixes and suffixes). Possible values: Y (yes) or N (no)
(3) Line count of the following rules.
Fields of an affix rules:
(0) Option name
(1) Flag
(2) stripping characters from beginning (at prefix rules) or end (at suffix rules) of the word
(3) affix (optionally with flags of continuation classes, separated by a slash)
(4) condition.
Zero stripping or affix are indicated by zero. Zero condition is indicated by dot. Condition is a simplified,
regular expression-like pattern, which must be met before the affix can be applied. (Dot signs an arbitrary char-
acter. Characters in braces sign an arbitrary character from the character subset. Dash hasn't got special mean-
ing, but circumflex (^) next the first brace sets the complementer character set.)
(5) Optional morphological fields separated by spaces or tabulators.
OTHER OPTIONS
CIRCUMFIX flag
Affixes signed with CIRCUMFIX flag may be on a word when this word also has a prefix with CIRCUMFIX flag and vice
versa.
FORBIDDENWORD flag
This flag signs forbidden word form. Because affixed forms are also forbidden, we can subtract a subset from set
of the accepted affixed and compound words.
FULLSTRIP
With FULLSTRIP, affix rules can strip full words, not only one less characters.
Note: conditions may be word length without FULLSTRIP, too.
KEEPCASE flag
Forbid uppercased and capitalized forms of words signed with KEEPCASE flags. Useful for special orthographies
(measurements and currency often keep their case in uppercased texts) and writing systems (e.g. keeping lower case
of IPA characters).
Note: With CHECKSHARPS declaration, words with sharp s and KEEPCASE flag may be capitalized and uppercased, but
uppercased forms of these words may not contain sharp s, only SS. See germancompounding example in the tests
directory of the Hunspell distribution.
Note: Using lot of zero affixes may have a big cost, because every zero affix is checked under affix analysis
before the other affixes.
ICONV number_of_ICONV_definitions
ICONV pattern pattern2
Define input conversion table.
OCONV number_of_OCONV_definitions
OCONV pattern pattern2
Define output conversion table.
LEMMA_PRESENT flag
Not used in Hunspell 1.2. Use "st:" field instead of LEMMA_PRESENT.
NEEDAFFIX flag
This flag signs virtual stems in the dictionary. Only affixed forms of these words will be accepted by Hunspell.
Except, if the dictionary word has a homonym or a zero affix. NEEDAFFIX works also with prefixes and prefix +
suffix combinations (see tests/pseudoroot5.*).
PSEUDOROOT flag
Deprecated. (Former name of the NEEDAFFIX option.)
SUBSTANDARD flag
SUBSTANDARD flag signs affix rules and dictionary words (allomorphs) not used in morphological generation (and in
suggestion in the future versions). See also NOSUGGEST.
WORDCHARS characters
WORDCHARS extends tokenizer of Hunspell command line interface with additional word character. For example, dot,
dash, n-dash, numbers, percent sign are word character in Hungarian.
CHECKSHARPS
SS letter pair in uppercased (German) words may be upper case sharp s (B). Hunspell can handle this special cas-
ing with the CHECKSHARPS declaration (see also KEEPCASE flag and tests/germancompounding example) in both spelling
and suggestion.
Morphological analysis
Hunspell's dictionary items and affix rules may have optional space or tabulator separated morphological description
fields, started with 3-character (two letters and a colon) field IDs:
word/flags po:noun is:nom
Example: We define a simple resource with morphological informations, a derivative suffix (ds:) and a part of speech cat-
egory (po:):
Affix file:
SFX X Y 1
SFX X 0 able . ds:able
Dictionary file:
drink/X po:verb
Test file:
drink
drinkable
Test:
$ analyze test.aff test.dic test.txt
> drink
analyze(drink) = po:verb
stem(drink) = po:verb
> drinkable
analyze(drinkable) = po:verb ds:able
stem(drinkable) = drinkable
You can see in the example, that the analyzer concatenates the morphological fields in item and arrangement style.
Optional data fields
Default morphological and other IDs (used in suggestion, stemming and morphological generation):
ph: Alternative transliteration for better suggestion. It's useful for words with foreign pronunciation. (Dictionary
based phonetic suggestion.) For example:
Marseille ph:maarsayl
st: Stem. Optional: default stem is the dictionary item in morphological analysis. Stem field is useful for virtual
stems (dictionary words with NEEDAFFIX flag) and morphological exceptions instead of new, single used morphologi-
cal rules.
feet st:foot is:plural
mice st:mouse is:plural
teeth st:tooth is:plural
Word forms with multiple stems need multiple dictionary items:
lay po:verb st:lie is:past_2
lay po:verb is:present
lay po:noun
al: Allomorph(s). A dictionary item is the stem of its allomorphs. Morphological generation needs stem, allomorph and
affix fields.
sing al:sang al:sung
sang st:sing
sung st:sing
po: Part of speech category.
ds: Derivational suffix(es). Stemming doesn't remove derivational suffixes. Morphological generation depends on the
order of the suffix fields.
In affix rules:
SFX Y Y 1
SFX Y 0 ly . ds:ly_adj
In the dictionary:
ably st:able ds:ly_adj
able al:ably
is: Inflectional suffix(es). All inflectional suffixes are removed by stemming. Morphological generation depends on
the order of the suffix fields.
feet st:foot is:plural
ts: Terminal suffix(es). Terminal suffix fields are inflectional suffix fields "removed" by additional (not terminal)
suffixes.
Useful for zero morphemes and affixes removed by splitting rules.
work/D ts:present
SFX D Y 2
SFX D 0 ed . is:past_1
SFX D 0 ed . is:past_2
Typical example of the terminal suffix is the zero morpheme of the nominative case.
sp: Surface prefix. Temporary solution for adding prefixes to the stems and generated word forms. See tests/morph.*
example.
pa: Parts of the compound words. Output fields of morphological analysis for stemming.
dp: Planned: derivational prefix.
ip: Planned: inflectional prefix.
tp: Planned: terminal prefix.
Twofold suffix stripping
Ispell's original algorithm strips only one suffix. Hunspell can strip another one yet (or a plus prefix in COMPLEXPRE-
FIXES mode).
The twofold suffix stripping is a significant improvement in handling of immense number of suffixes, that characterize
agglutinative languages.
A second `s' suffix (affix class Y) will be the continuation class of the suffix `able' in the following example:
SFX Y Y 1
SFX Y 0 s .
SFX X Y 1
SFX X 0 able/Y .
Dictionary file:
drink/X
Test file:
drink
drinkable
drinkables
Test:
$ hunspell -m -d test <test.txt
drink st:drink
drinkable st:drink fl:X
drinkables st:drink fl:X fl:Y
Theoretically with the twofold suffix stripping needs only the square root of the number of suffix rules, compared with a
Hunspell implementation. In our practice, we could have elaborated the Hungarian inflectional morphology with twofold
suffix stripping.
Extended affix classes
Hunspell can handle more than 65000 affix classes. There are three new syntax for giving flags in affix and dictionary
files.
FLAG long command sets 2-character flags:
FLAG long
SFX Y1 Y 1
SFX Y1 0 s 1
Dictionary record with the Y1, Z3, F? flags:
foo/Y1Z3F?
FLAG num command sets numerical flags separated by comma:
FLAG num
SFX 65000 Y 1
SFX 65000 0 s 1
Dictionary example:
foo/65000,12,2756
The third one is the Unicode character flags.
Homonyms
Hunspell's dictionary can contain repeating elements that are homonyms:
work/A po:verb
work/B po:noun
An affix file:
SFX A Y 1
SFX A 0 s . sf:sg3
SFX B Y 1
SFX B 0 s . is:plur
Test file:
works
Test:
$ hunspell -d test -m <testwords
work st:work po:verb is:sg3
work st:work po:noun is:plur
This feature also gives a way to forbid illegal prefix/suffix combinations.
Prefix--suffix dependencies
An interesting side-effect of multi-step stripping is, that the appropriate treatment of circumfixes now comes for free.
For instance, in Hungarian, superlatives are formed by simultaneous prefixation of leg- and suffixation of -bb to the
adjective base. A problem with the one-level architecture is that there is no way to render lexical licensing of partic-
ular prefixes and suffixes interdependent, and therefore incorrect forms are recognized as valid, i.e. *legven = leg +
ven `old'. Until the introduction of clusters, a special treatment of the superlative had to be hardwired in the earlier
HunSpell code. This may have been legitimate for a single case, but in fact prefix--suffix dependences are ubiquitous in
category-changing derivational patterns (cf. English payable, non-payable but *non-pay or drinkable, undrinkable but
*undrink). In simple words, here, the prefix un- is legitimate only if the base drink is suffixed with -able. If both
these patters are handled by on-line affix rules and affix rules are checked against the base only, there is no way to
express this dependency and the system will necessarily over- or undergenerate.
In next example, suffix class R have got a prefix `continuation' class (class P).
PFX P Y 1
PFX P 0 un . [prefix_un]+
SFX S Y 1
SFX S 0 s . +PL
SFX Q Y 1
SFX Q 0 s . +3SGV
SFX R Y 1
SFX R 0 able/PS . +DER_V_ADJ_ABLE
Dictionary:
2
drink/RQ [verb]
drink/S [noun]
Morphological analysis:
> drink
drink[verb]
drink[noun]
> drinks
drink[verb]+3SGV
drink[noun]+PL
> drinkable
drink[verb]+DER_V_ADJ_ABLE
> drinkables
drink[verb]+DER_V_ADJ_ABLE+PL
> undrinkable
[prefix_un]+drink[verb]+DER_V_ADJ_ABLE
> undrinkables
[prefix_un]+drink[verb]+DER_V_ADJ_ABLE+PL
> undrink
Unknown word.
> undrinks
Unknown word.
Circumfix
Conditional affixes implemented by a continuation class are not enough for circumfixes, because a circumfix is one affix
in morphology. We also need CIRCUMFIX option for correct morphological analysis.
# circumfixes: ~ obligate prefix/suffix combinations
# superlative in Hungarian: leg- (prefix) AND -bb (suffix)
# nagy, nagyobb, legnagyobb, legeslegnagyobb
# (great, greater, greatest, most greatest)
CIRCUMFIX X
PFX A Y 1
PFX A 0 leg/X .
PFX B Y 1
PFX B 0 legesleg/X .
SFX C Y 3
SFX C 0 obb . +COMPARATIVE
SFX C 0 obb/AX . +SUPERLATIVE
SFX C 0 obb/BX . +SUPERSUPERLATIVE
Dictionary:
1
nagy/C [MN]
Analysis:
> nagy
nagy[MN]
> nagyobb
nagy[MN]+COMPARATIVE
> legnagyobb
nagy[MN]+SUPERLATIVE
> legeslegnagyobb
nagy[MN]+SUPERSUPERLATIVE
Compounds
Allowing free compounding yields decrease in precision of recognition, not to mention stemming and morphological analy-
sis. Although lexical switches are introduced to license compounding of bases by Ispell, this proves not to be restric-
tive enough. For example:
# affix file
COMPOUNDFLAG X
2
foo/X
bar/X
With this resource, foobar and barfoo also are accepted words.
This has been improved upon with the introduction of direction-sensitive compounding, i.e., lexical features can specify
separately whether a base can occur as leftmost or rightmost constituent in compounds. This, however, is still insuffi-
cient to handle the intricate patterns of compounding, not to mention idiosyncratic (and language specific) norms of
hyphenation.
The Hunspell algorithm currently allows any affixed form of words, which are lexically marked as potential members of
compounds. Hunspell improved this, and its recursive compound checking rules makes it possible to implement the intricate
spelling conventions of Hungarian compounds. For example, using COMPOUNDWORDMAX, COMPOUNDSYLLABLE, COMPOUNDROOT, SYLLA-
BLENUM options can be set the noteworthy Hungarian `6-3' rule. Further example in Hungarian, derivate suffixes often
modify compounding properties. Hunspell allows the compounding flags on the affixes, and there are two special flags
(COMPOUNDPERMITFLAG and (COMPOUNDFORBIDFLAG) to permit or prohibit compounding of the derivations.
Suffixes with this flag forbid compounding of the affixed word.
We also need several Hunspell features for handling German compounding:
# German compounding
# set language to handle special casing of German sharp s
LANG de_DE
# compound flags
COMPOUNDBEGIN U
COMPOUNDMIDDLE V
COMPOUNDEND W
# Prefixes are allowed at the beginning of compounds,
# suffixes are allowed at the end of compounds by default:
# (prefix)?(root)+(affix)?
# Affixes with COMPOUNDPERMITFLAG may be inside of compounds.
COMPOUNDPERMITFLAG P
# for German fogemorphemes (Fuge-element)
# Hint: ONLYINCOMPOUND is not required everywhere, but the
# checking will be a little faster with it.
ONLYINCOMPOUND X
# forbid uppercase characters at compound word bounds
CHECKCOMPOUNDCASE
# for handling Fuge-elements with dashes (Arbeits-)
# dash will be a special word
COMPOUNDMIN 1
WORDCHARS -
# compound settings and fogemorpheme for `Arbeit'
SFX A Y 3
SFX A 0 s/UPX .
SFX A 0 s/VPDX .
SFX A 0 0/WXD .
SFX B Y 2
SFX B 0 0/UPX .
SFX B 0 0/VWXDP .
# a suffix for `Computer'
SFX C Y 1
SFX C 0 n/WD .
# for forbid exceptions (*Arbeitsnehmer)
FORBIDDENWORD Z
# dash prefix for compounds with dash (Arbeits-Computer)
PFX - Y 1
PFX - 0 -/P .
# decapitalizing prefix
# circumfix for positioning in compounds
PFX D Y 29
PFX D A a/PX A
PFX D A a/PX A
.
.
PFX D Y y/PX Y
PFX D Z z/PX Z
Example dictionary:
4
Arbeit/A-
Computer/BC-
-/W
Arbeitsnehmer/Z
Accepted compound compound words with the previous resource:
Computer
Computern
Arbeit
Arbeits-
Computerarbeit
Computerarbeits-
Arbeitscomputer
Arbeitscomputern
Computerarbeitscomputer
Computerarbeitscomputern
Arbeitscomputerarbeit
Computerarbeits-Computer
Computerarbeits-Computern
Not accepted compoundings:
computer
arbeit
Arbeits
arbeits
ComputerArbeit
ComputerArbeits
Arbeitcomputer
ArbeitsComputer
Computerarbeitcomputer
ComputerArbeitcomputer
ComputerArbeitscomputer
Arbeitscomputerarbeits
Computerarbeits-computer
Arbeitsnehmer
This solution is still not ideal, however, and will be replaced by a pattern-based compound-checking algorithm which is
closely integrated with input buffer tokenization. Patterns describing compounds come as a separate input resource that
can refer to high-level properties of constituent parts (e.g. the number of syllables, affix flags, and containment of
hyphens). The patterns are matched against potential segmentations of compounds to assess wellformedness.
Unicode character encoding
Both Ispell and Myspell use 8-bit ASCII character encoding, which is a major deficiency when it comes to scalability.
Although a language like Hungarian has a standard ASCII character set (ISO 8859-2), it fails to allow a full implementa-
tion of Hungarian orthographic conventions. For instance, the '--' symbol (n-dash) is missing from this character set
contrary to the fact that it is not only the official symbol to delimit parenthetic clauses in the language, but it can
be in compound words as a special 'big' hyphen.
MySpell has got some 8-bit encoding tables, but there are languages without standard 8-bit encoding, too. For example, a
lot of African languages have non-latin or extended latin characters.
Similarly, using the original spelling of certain foreign names like Angstrom or Moliere is encouraged by the Hungarian
spelling norm, and, since characters 'A' and 'e' are not part of ISO 8859-2, when they combine with inflections contain-
ing characters only in ISO 8859-2 (like elative -bl, allative -tl or delative -rl with double acute), these result in
words (like Angstromrl or Moliere-tl.) that can not be encoded using any single ASCII encoding scheme.
The problems raised in relation to 8-bit ASCII encoding have long been recognized by proponents of Unicode. It is clear
that trading efficiency for encoding-independence has its advantages when it comes a truly multi-lingual application.
There is implemented a memory and time efficient Unicode handling in Hunspell. In non-UTF-8 character encodings Hunspell
works with the original 8-bit strings. In UTF-8 encoding, affixes and words are stored in UTF-8, during the analysis are
handled in mostly UTF-8, under condition checking and suggestion are converted to UTF-16. Unicode text analysis and spell
checking have a minimal (0-20%) time overhead and minimal or reasonable memory overhead depends from the language (its
UTF-8 encoding and affixation).
Conversion of aspell dictionaries
Aspell dictionaries can be easily converted into hunspell. Conversion steps:
dictionary (xx.cwl -> xx.wl):
preunzip xx.cwl
wc -l < xx.wl > xx.dic
cat xx.wl >> xx.dic
affix file
If the affix file exists, copy it:
cp xx_affix.dat xx.aff
If not, create it with the suitable character encoding (see xx.dat)
echo "SET ISO8859-x" > xx.aff
or
echo "SET UTF-8" > xx.aff
It's useful to add a TRY option with the characters of the dictionary with frequency order to set edit distance sugges-
tions:
echo "TRY qwertzuiopasdfghjklyxcvbnmQWERTZUIOPASDFGHJKLYXCVBNM" >>xx.aff
SEE ALSO
hunspell (1), ispell (1), ispell (4)
2010-03-03 hunspell(4)
