[Xapian-discuss] Multiple spelling suggestions

Jean-Francois Dockes jf at dockes.org
Mon May 9 07:08:49 BST 2011


Hello,

I am looking at the Xapian database spelling support, with the idea of
getting rid of the cumbersome use of aspell in my application.

One advantage of aspell, though, (in my eye), is that it can supply a list
of alternate spellings, not just the one it considers best.

In some cases, this can be useful. 2 examples on my test index:

porbability: xapian suggests portability, which is nice, but I was
intending probability which is in the aspell list all right.

macdonell: xapian suggests macdonald, all right again, but aspell also
suggests mcdowell and mcdonald, which might be actually useful to someone
trying to remember the name of a correspondant.

When just trying to quick-fix the query, or running an alternate query like
Google does, using the "best" candidate is fine. But having another mode to
let the user choose among a list of possibles is nice too.

Any chance that Xapian would support this ?

Cheers,

jf



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