Towards an Integrated Environment for Spanish Document Verification and Composition

TOWARDS AN INTEGRATEI) ENVIRONMENT FOR SPANISH DOCUMENT VERIFICATION AND COMPOSITION R. Casajuana, C. Rodriguez, 1,. Sopefia, C. Villar IBM Madrid Scientific Center Paseo de la Castellana, 4 28046 Madrid ABSTRACT Languages other than English have received little attention as far as the application of natural language processing techniques to text composition is concer- ned. The present paper describes briefly work under development aiming at the design of an integrated environment for the construction and verification of documents written in Spanish. in a first phase, a dictionary of Spanish has been implemented, together with a synonym dictionary. The main features of both dictionaries will be summarised, and how they are applied in an environment for document verification and composition. INTRODUCTION In the field of document processing many tools exist today which allow the user to introduce a text in storage, format it, and even, for a few languages, verify the spelling, punctuation and style il, 2, 3, 41. English has been for a long time TIIE Natural Language, object of a large number of research and development work in Computational Linguistics. Other languages, however (Spanish among them), have received little attention as far as the application of natural language processing techniques to text composition is concer- ned. The present paper describes briefly work under development aiming at the design of an integrated environment for the construction and verification of documents written in Spanish, for which no similar tools exist at the moment. In a first phase, a dictionary of Spanish was implemented. This is a task of multiple interest, a dictionary being the one of the basic tools for any application to systems where Natural Language is in- volved. Thus its development was undertaken with two guidelines, completeness and generality. At present, the dictionary is finished in a version including about 35,000 stems, which, inflected, give rise to more than 400,000 different words. Together with this inflected forms lexicon, a synonym dictionary was also built as a second step in the text processing system; this dictionary has about 15,000 entries. In this paper we summarise the main features of both dictionaries and how they are applied in an environment for document verification and composition. Present and planned enhancements will be also described, including the use of a parser of Spanish and the addition of other features. TIIF, IN FI.ECI'[:,I) FORMS DICTIONARY "lhe starting point was an analysis of word frequency performed on different texts previously selected: press articles, novels, essays, etc. totalling approximately one million words. A listing of the whole set of the entries of the Diecionario de la Real Academia Espafiola 15] (DRAE, Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, containing the "official" Spanish language) was studied, and several other published dictionaries were as well collated 16, 7, 8, 91. The information so obtained was classified and filtered, taking into account the objective and first set up application: the corpus had to cover ttrual written iangltage, and in this field should account for as much of the vocabulary as possible. …

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