An intelligent spelling checker
For Microsoft Word 97 and Word 2000

SYMFONIA is a spelling checker with 'extended' functionality compared to other commercial spelling checkers. Its basic features include the spelling checking, agreement checking (an innovative feature of SYMFONIA, not included in any other spelling checker), enrichment of the dictionary with unknown words and grammatical characterisation of the words (another innovative feature of SYMFONIA).

SYMFONIA is fully incorporated in Word 97 and Word 2000 of Microsoft, and is addressed to users who would like to produce texts free of spelling, typing and syntactical errors with the minimum of effort. Its target group of users includes journalists, translators, writers, administrators, students, secretaries, and, in general, anyone who is committed to the correct usage of the Greek language for either professional or personal use.

SYMFONIA's spelling checker module is fully incorporated in Word's spelling checker system, thus, making all its functionality applicable to the Greek language. In particular, every word that the user types is checked for its spelling and underlined in red colour in case it is identified as misspelled. The user can view SYMFONIA's list of suggestions on the correct spelling of a red-coloured word by right clicking on it. The spelling checker is based on a dictionary of 65,000 entries, for every one of which its inflected forms can be generated practically at no time (more than 1,600,000 inflected forms in total can be generated). The advantage from this wide coverage of the Greek language is that it comprises spelling and morphological variants (e.g.γυρνάνε, γυρνάν, γυρνούν, γυρνούνε or αγαναχτούν, αγαναχτούνε and αγανακτούν, αγανακτούνε), which is a fundamental feature of contemporary Greek.

SYMFONIA employs a context-based spelling check technique, in addition to the isolated word-based approach, upon which all the other spelling checkers in the market exclusively depend in order to accomplish their task. Clearly, common spelling checkers fail to report spelling errors in cases where the word under process is a valid one on its own. Cases where words sound similarly but are spelt differently (e.g. δόσεις / δώσεις), in which the spelling depends on the grammatical identity of the word is not solved in these products.

SYMFONIA, as an intelligent spelling checker system, not only checks the spelling of every single word in the text, but also checks the immediate context of every word in order to identify specific phrases patterns, e.g. article-noun, verb-pronoun, etc., and based on syntactic rules, to decide the word's grammatical identity. It uses the information extracted from this rule-based agreement checking of the context of the word being checked to identify possible misspellings and suggest correct spelling renderings of the word in question. Here are some examples: (η) δόση (noun) and (θα, να, ας) δώσει (verb) or (αυτός, αυτή, αυτό) ετοιμάζεται (third person singular of the passive voice) and (εσείς) ετοιμάζετε (second person plural of the active voice).

This is an interesting feature that enables the user to effectively deal with the words that are not present in the standard dictionary that ships with SYMFONIA and, therefore, are initially reported by it as unknown. The key feature in this enrichment process is that the addition of a word in the dictionary does not concern only the specific word-form, but all the inflected forms. As a result, SYMFONIA successfully recognises all subsequent occurrences of inflected types of the added word, thus, saving the user from repeated "add to dictionary" sessions.

For example, to add the term "γαστρεντερολογικής" in the dictionary, the user enters (at the enrichment dialog box of SYMFONIA) the number, case and gender and the grammatical category of that word, which in this case are singular, genitive and feminine of an adjective respectively. Then the system generates all possible inflected forms (by look-up in the morphological lexicon's inflectional paradigms) and the user selects the appropriate one.

The enrichment feature can prove to be essentially helpful in writing documents of specialised content, where a dictionary of special terms needs to be built.

By right clicking on every word of the text, the user can get information about its grammatical features.

Minimum system requirements:

• PC Pentium
• 32 MB RAM
• 45 MB free disk space
• Microsoft Windows 95 or later
• Microsoft Word 97 or 2000.

Contact person: Nick Glaros