SAOL Plus - a new Swedish electronic dictionary

• SAOL Plus – a new Swedish electronic dictionary System requirements: Windows 98/NT/2000/XP/Vista In September 2007, a CD version of the Swedish Academy Glossary (SAOL) was released, SAOL Plus, which includes all used inflected forms and an advanced Fuzzy Search option, based on pronunciation. The printed version has loong been considered the (unofficial) norm for spelling, inflection and pronunciation of Swedish. It is not a traditional dictionary with complete definitions, although many lemmas are defined or commented. It contains 125 000 lemmas, which is about twice as many as other Swedish monolingual dictionaries. SAOL Plus has the standard search functions, as well as more advanced search options due to the electronic format, such as article search and truncation search. It contains more inflected forms in number and detail than the printed version, and these are shown in full text and made searchable. Thanks to its built-in tool for Fuzzy Search, SAOL Plus is very useful for people with reading and writing disorders, as well as for those for whom Swedish is a second language. SAOL Plus can be an asset for the public as well as for linguists, teachers etc. SMDB, the Swedish Morphological Database, contains all lemmas from SAOL and their inflected forms, morpho-syntactically tagged. However, the database is constructed from all theoretically possible inflections of the lemmas. Some inflections are not grammatically correct or generally accepted, and therefore it has been necessary to extract the semantically plausible forms. Via a tag program connected to a 200 million word corpus, frequency of occurrence of specific word forms can easily be extracted. One challenge has been to scrutinize one million word forms in order to decide which forms should be presented on the cd. SAOL Plus has a tool called Fuzzy Search, which efficiently handles misspelling. This helps the user get to the target word, even if the user doesn’t know how it is spelled. The module for handling misspelling is based on both pronunciation and transposition of letters. The Fuzzy Search can easily be used as a spell-checker together with Word. To the best of our knowledge, this fuzzy search (and spell-checker) based on pronunciation, has few equivalents in its field.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Keyword

lexikografi

SAOL

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)