Description

The main purpose of the project is to provide applications for proofreading Bulgarian texts (spelling and grammar), detect errors and generate the most appropriate suggestions for corrections.

Advanced language applications have been developed, which enhance the workflow in text-processing of Bulgarian by detecting a large number of errors (both spelling and grammar errors) and suggesting the most relevant replacements:

  • Est  – an application for spell checking of Bulgarian texts and generation of replacement suggestions;
  • Est+ – an application for grammar checking of Bulgarian texts.

The products are available in the following way:

  • Web services WebEst  and WebEst+ for spelling and grammar checking online or to integrate into web applications.
  • Windows applications WinEst and WinEst+ for spelling and grammar checking.
  • Mac OS applications MacEst and MacEst+ for spelling and grammar checking.

The applications are based on:

  • Large in quantity and consistent language resources:
    – various inflection dictionaries (Grammar dictionary, Proper names dictionary, abbreviations);
    – context-dependent rules for combinations of grammatical features, words or lexicons;
    – regular expressions to distinguish between elements of the texts and determine their type.
  • Efficient (in terms of speed, coverage and precision) programs for Bulgarian language processing – detect text units (tokenizer) and assign correct grammatical characteristics in a given context (tagger and lemmatizer).

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The creation of modern web based linguistic applications is urged on one hand, by the growing use of Internet in everyday communications (work, study, administration, media), and on the other – the lack of modern web based language applications for Bulgarian.

The advantages of the web based linguistic applications can be summarized as follows: they are more accessible to use as they are not related to any operation system or Web browser. The wider use of the Internet not only as an environment for communication but also as an operating environment, which includes text creation and editing, increases the importance of the project outcomes.