Compound word spelling verification

Abstract

A compound word spelling verification technique is described for use with a dictionary which does not include all verifiable compounds. During attempted verfication of a text word, all initial substrings of the word found in the dictionary are saved in a list. If the entire word is not found in the dictionary, the longest substring in the substring list is subtracted from the entire word to be verified to yield a 'remainder' portion of the input text word. The dictionary words are then compared with this remainder portion to determine if a match occurs. If so, then both portions of the word are found in the dictionary and spelling of the word is considered correct. If the remainder is not found in the dictionary, successively shorter initial substrings are accessed to yield successively longer remainders. The word is considered correctly spelled if both a substring and a remainder are found in the dictionary. This techinque is applied recursively so that multiple-piece compounds can also be found.