CENTRE DE TRAITEMENT AUTOMATIQUE DU LANGAGE

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ACTISPELL

Titre complet

ACTISPELL : a real time and updated spellchecker for text professionals.

Abstract

These last years, the information society emergence has aroused the line up and the content sharing which are still more elaborate and more voluminous. In this society which consumes information as fast than she creates it ; and maybe more ; the production constraints which influence on information suppliers are still stronger. So the computing systems that manage this information has been improved to handle all the life process of an information from its creation, through its diffusion or its online publication, up to its filing. Information systems of press groups or TV channels, that are called Media Asset Management, are a very good demonstration.

In this context, every firm that produces big quantities of documents with strong time constraints, the texts quality control problem is a big problem. Spell and grammatical checking tools are certainly obvious. They are the first defence against the incorrections increase, but they are affected by an important restriction : they don't evolve as fast as the information does, they don't fit to this information. Thus neologisms and proper nouns are a problem, because they appear every day and if there's any doubt it is the user that has to check the spell of these unknown words. This manual check, sometimes tough and time consuming, won't be a benefit to other writers of the firm and the work will certainly be repeated a lot of times.

ACTISPELL wants to deliver a spell ckeck system that is based on updated and real time dictionaries , dictionaries that fit to current events and are not stuck by new words or proper nouns. This system can be totally integrated to usual tools that are used by firms, writers still work in their usual environment ; from a simple word processing software like Word or Open Office to a huge document management system. The control of the dictionaries update are conducted by a linguists team in an external firm which owns strong linguistic watch tools ; to follow the lexical changes ; and dictionary management tools. The update is automatically done thanks to the Internet like an antivirus does. ACTISPELL, it is a linguist in your spell check software.

Région wallonne

First Spin-off

Duration

  • 24 months
  • Start : october 2007.

Researcher

    Kévin Macé

Advisor

Prof. Cédrick Fairon,
Director of the CENTAL

Partners

  • J. Leenknegt
  • B. Gailly
  • S. Paumier

Industrial partner