4.0816 Rs: Phonetic Spelling Checker (1/13)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Wed, 5 Dec 90 20:53:17 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0816. Wednesday, 5 Dec 1990.

Date: Wed, 5 Dec 90 14:30:17 -0500
From: David Durand <dgd@cs.bu.edu>
Subject: RE: 4.0808 Qs: Phonetic Spelling Checker...

In reply to Marilyn Deegan's request for a phonetic spelling checker,
there are several such around, as engines in commercial spell-checker
packages. The best available (back a few years ago, when I worked on
such stuff), was a product sold by Houghton-Mifflin to various computer
manufacturers. I may be predjudiced, as I helped work on the product,
but in the phoneticly-based correction arena it really was superior in
the tests we ran. I know that Digital's DecSpell product has this
engine (as well as a relatively horrible interface). Perhaps you have
Decspell on vax.ox.ac.uk.

For instance, our corrector could handle spellings such as felasofie,
and prewn for philosophy and prune.