Approved-By:  "EDTECH Moderator" <21765EDT@MSU.BITNET>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edtech
Date:         Sun, 13 Sep 1992 20:36:20 EDT
From:         Gleason Sackman <sackman@plains.nodak.edu>
Subject:      [sci.lang] Natural language wordlists available (fwd)

Date: 4 Sep 92 07:52:41 GMT
From: stolfi@src.dec.com (Jorge Stolfi)
Subject: [sci.lang] Natural language wordlists available
Newsgroups: comp.archives
Summary: A collection of inflected wordlists for several natural

Archive-name: auto/sci.lang/Natural-language-wordlists-available

A few months ago I collected half a dozen natural language wordlists by
anonymous ftp from various places around the world.  I spent a couple
of weeks regularizing the spelling conventions, merging the lists into
one per language, and removing various junk.  The result is now
available through anonymous FTP from

    site:      gatekeeper.dec.com
    directory: pub/misc/stolfi-wordlists

The package's README file (below) describes the wordlists and how to
unpack them.  Each wordlist has its separate README file, which gives
more details on the source of the words, spelling conventions, etc.

Note: To save space and transmission time, they were crunched with a
non-standard crunching algorithm specialized for sorted word lists, and
then piped though the Unix utilities "tar" "compress".  The package
includes an un-crunching program (in Unix C).


PACKAGE: DEC SRC Collection of Public Domain Wordlists
VERSION: DEC-SRC-92-04-05

EDITOR

    Jorge Stolfi

    (Until 92-Aug-24:)
    DEC Systems Research Center
    130 Lytton Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94301
    Phone: [USA] (415) 853-2226

    (After 92-Aug-24:)
    DCC - Universidade Estadual de Campinas
    Caixa Postal 6065
    13081 Campinas, SP - Brazil
    Phone: +55 (192) 39 8442
    E-Mail: <stolfi@dcc.unicamp.ansp.br>

DESCRIPTION

  This package contains wordlists for several natural languages, which
  may be useful for linguistic research and text-processing
  applications such as spelling checkers.  They were compiled from
  several publicly available files that I obtained by anonymous FTP
  from various sites around the world.

  All the credit for this package should go to the authors of the
  original lists, who did all the actual work and made the results
  available for public use.  In particular, I wish to thank

        Anders Ellefsrud
        Andy Tannenbaum
        Arjan de Vet
        Barry Brachman
        Dan Klein
        David Vincenzetti
        Edward Vielmetti
        Geoff Kuenning
        H. Morrow Long
        Hans Bouw
        Henk Smit
        Martien Kuunders
        Neal Dalton
        Paul Stravers
        Stefan Kutsch
        Walt Buehring
        Werner Icking

  My role here is only one of editor and collector: basically, I
  feteched, compared, and merged the files, trying to uniformize the
  spelling conventions for each language (such as the encoding of
  accents) and removing obvious typos, non-words, and "foreign" words.
  My efforts were necessarily limited by my ignorance of most of these
  languages, and by the limited time I could spen in the cleanup (a
  couple of days for each list).

(NON-)COPYRIGHT STATUS

  To the best of my knowledge, all the files I used to build these
  wordlists were available for public distribution and use, at least
  for non-commercial purposes.  I have confirmed this assumption with
  the authors of the lists, whenever they were known.

  Therefore, it is safe to assume that the wordlists in this package
  can also be freely copied, distributed, modified, and used for
  personal, educational, and research purposes.  (Use of these files in
  commercial products may require written permission from DEC and/or
  the authors of the original lists.)

  Whenever you distribute any of these wordlists, please distribute
  also the accompanying README file.  If you distribute a modified
  copy of one of these wordlists, please include the original README
  file with a note explaining your modifications.  Your users will
  surely appreciate that.

(NO-)WARRANTY DISCLAIMER

  These files, like the original wordlists on which they are based,
  are still very incomplete, uneven, and inconsitent, and probably
  contain many errors.  They are offered "as is" without any warranty
  of correctness or fitness for any particular purpose.  Neither I nor
  my employer can be held responsible for any losses or damages that
  may result from their use.

FILES

  This package contains the following sub-directories and files:

    README

      This file.

    unpack-words

      A shell script that unpacks the compressed archives (see below).

    expanddict.c

      A C program used by "unpack-words" to expand the wordlists
      after extracting them from the archive file.

    dutch/

       FILE                   CONTENTS                WORDS     BYTES
      ---------------------  ---------------------  -------- ---------
       dutch.words            words & names          189249   2137557
       dutch.trash            rejected material        1910     14802
       dutch.maybe            unclassified            43059    579746

    english/

       FILE                   CONTENTS                WORDS     BYTES
      ---------------------  ---------------------  -------- ---------
       english.words          plain words            104206   1055781
       english.names          proper names             6186     54253
       org.names              organizations             154      1229
       computer.names         computer orgs & prods      88       676
       misc.names             "foreign" names          2020     16470
       english.abbrs          abbreviations             671      3086
       english.trash          rejected material        3123     25210
       english.maybe          unclassified             5906     57754

    german/

       FILE                   CONTENTS                WORDS     BYTES
      ---------------------  ---------------------  -------- ---------
       german.words           words & names          174537   2260942
       german.trash           rejected material        2187     16240

    italian/

       FILE                   CONTENTS                WORDS     BYTES
      ---------------------  ---------------------  -------- ---------
       italian.words          plain words             61183    573117
       italian.trash          rejected material        1867     14816

    norwegian/

       FILE                   CONTENTS                WORDS     BYTES
      ---------------------  ---------------------  -------- ---------
       norwegian.words        plain words             61839    598547
       norwegian.trash        rejected material           5        30

    swedish/

       FILE                   CONTENTS                WORDS     BYTES
      ---------------------  ---------------------  -------- ---------
       swedish.words          words & names           14944    126412
       swedish.trash          rejected material        8744     79217

  In general,

   foo/foo.words   is the main wordlist for language foo.

   foo/foo.trash   is a collection of "words" from the original
                   wordlists that I believe are either invalid
                   or do not belong in foo.words.

  For more details, consult the README files in each sub-directory.

COMPRESSED ARCHIVES

  The package is available for public FTP as a set of compressed "tar"
  files, one per language:

    -rw-r--r--  500455 Aug  2 03:17 dutch.tar.Z
    -rw-r--r--  246631 Aug  2 03:13 english.tar.Z
    -rw-r--r--  374418 Aug  2 03:15 german.tar.Z
    -rw-r--r--   68797 Aug  2 03:13 italian.tar.Z
    -rw-r--r--  123145 Aug  2 03:18 norwegian.tar.Z
    -rw-r--r--   61743 Aug  2 03:17 swedish.tar.Z

  To recover the wordlists, copy the "unpack-words" script
  and any subset of the archives above to a clean working directory;
  then do "unpack-words <language>" for each language.

  The script should uncompress and un-tar the archive,
  compile the 'expanddict.c" filter (included in archive),
  and pipe each wordlist through it.

  I would greatly appreciate any additions corrections to the
  wordlists or to the accompanying documentation, and any pointers to
  additional publicly available wordlists.

  --jorge

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gleason Sackman                           BBS:       sackman@sendit.nodak.edu
Coordinator                               Internet:  sackman@plains.nodak.edu
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