A Language-Sensitive Text Editor for Dutch

Modern word processors begin to offer a range of facilities for spelling, grammar and style checking in English. For the Dutch language hardly anything is available as yet. Many commercial word processing packages do include a hyphenation routine and a lexicon-based spelling checker but the practical usefulness of these tools is limited due to certain properties of Dutch orthography, as we will explain below. In this chapter we describe a text editor which incorporates a great deal of lexical, morphological and syntactic knowledge of Dutch and monitors the orthographical quality of Dutch texts. Section 1 deals with those aspects of Dutch orthography which pose problems to human authors as well as to computational language sensitive text editing tools. In section 2 we describe the design and the implementation of the text editor we have built. Section 3 is mainly devoted to a provisional evaluation of the system. 1. Some Dutch spelling problems The three hardest problems of Dutch orthography are easily explained in terms of a comparison with English, French and German: 1. As in English, there are quite a few homophonous spelling patterns whose occurrence in specific words is difficult to remember. For instance, the sound /eI/ is spelled as ei in some words but as ij in other ones. In addition, proper names often spell the same sound as y, ey or even eij. And there are four common ways of rendering the diphthong which sounds like the one in Eng. how: ou, au, ouw and auw. The consonant /k/ is spelled as either c, cc, k or kk, and as ck in many proper names. And many authors forget when to reduplicate a vowel or a consonant (e.g. double d and l in onmiddellijk, Eng. immediately). 2. As in French, various frequent inflectional suffixes are homophonous. For example, the verb gebeuren (Eng to happen) has a third-person singular present-tense form gebeurt which sounds exactly the same as the past participle gebeurd. Due to wordfinal devoicing, the endings -t and -d are both pronounced /t/. If the verb stem ends in -d (also pronounced /t/), the third-person -t suffix is obligatorily added although it cannot be heard (as in the passive auxiliary wordt, Eng is). Thus, the third person singular is orthographically distinguished from the homophonous first-person