Creating and Weighting Hunspell Dictionaries as Finite-State Automata

There are numerous formats for writing spell-checkers for open-source systems and there are many lexical descriptions for natural languages written in these formats. In this paper, we demonstrate a method for converting Hunspell and related spell-checking lexicons into finite-state automata. We also present a simple way to apply unigram corpus training in order to improve the spellchecking suggestion mechanism using weighted finite-state technology. What we propose is a generic and efficient language-independent framework of weighted finite-state automata for spell-checking in typical open-source software, e.g. Mozilla Firefox, OpenOffice and the Gnome desktop.