Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2004 09:41:24 +0300
From: Nadav Har'El

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004, Kevin Atkinson wrote:

> Do you consider the Hebrew dictionary complete in the sense of
> containing almost all words found in common usage?

For verbs, the answer is yes - we've been hard-pressed to find even one
missing and useful (not obsolete, archaic, and so on) verb since the last
release. For nouns, it is less complete, but still quite complete, and I
estimate that on average people won't see more than a couple of real words
found as "mispellings" in a document. The completeness situation is improving
from release to release (e.g., between release 0.7 and 0.8 we added 2,000
missing words), and we're hoping that it won't be a problem any more by
release 1.0.

> Also, do you consider it accurate in being free of
> misspelling or invalid words, including ones which may result from affix
> expansion.

Yes. We've worked very hard to make sure that only correct words appear in
the word list. Sure, to err is human, but at least we didn't use any
automatic method to find missing words (such methods always bring some
errors into the dictionary), and we tried extra had to verify the correctness
of every word we add.

While we only added correct words, we cannot say that every word is very
frequently used, or useful. Sometimes we added words that are correct,
but are quite rarely used (we tried to avoid obsolete words, though).
Sometimes, when you take a rare word and inflect it (say, "our gramophones")
you get a word which is technically correct, but quite unlikely to be
used in practice. Sometimes, this will cause real spelling errors to be
not caught, because the mispelled word looks like another valid word. But
unfortuantely, there is not much we can do about this issue. This is a
problem with Hebrew, which because it is written without (most) vowels,
has a high word "density" - much more random words are real words than,
say, in English.

