| Description | Ragel was developed by using traditional methods for stemming/lemmatisation (i.e. affix stripping), and consists of language-specific rules for identifying word-forms in the lexicon of the spelling checker. However, Ragel cannot be considered either a "pure" lemmatiser or a "pure" stemmer in the true sense of the word, since it was developed specifically for purposes of spelling checking. In this sense, both derived and inflected word-forms that are not in the lexicon of the spelling checker are analysed by Ragel, only until a word in the lexicon is found, whether that word is a lemma or not (e.g. "ontbossing" 'deforestation' will be analysed as "ontbos" 'deforest' and not necessarily as "bos" 'forest'). Moreover, Ragel does not cover the full complexity of Afrikaans morphology, but only a subset that was considered (a) highly productive; and (b) unproblematic in terms of morphonological changes. Ragel has been implemented in Afrikaanse Speltoetser 3.0, Tesourus 1.0 en Woordafbreker. |
