One of the types of objects in Praat. For checking the spelling in texts and TextGrid objects.
1. How to create a SpellingChecker object
You normally read in a SpellingChecker with Read from file... from the Open menu.
2. How to check the spelling of a TextGrid
A SpellingChecker object can be used fur purposes of spelling checking. In order to check the spellings in a TextGrid object, you first view the TextGrid in an editor window by selecting the TextGrid together with the SpellingChecker object, and clicking View & Edit. In most cases, you will also want to select a Sound or LongSound object before clicking View & Edit, so that a representation of the sound is also visible (and audible) in the editor. Thus, you typically select three objects and click View & Edit. The editor then allows you to check the spellings (commands Check spelling in tier and Check spelling in interval from the Spell menu).
3. How to create a SpellingChecker object for the first time
If you are the maintainer of a word list for spelling checking, you will want to convert this list to a SpellingChecker object that you can distribute among the transcribers of your corpus.
The first step is to create a WordList object from your text file, as described on the WordList man page. Then you simply click To SpellingChecker. A button labelled View & Edit... appears. This command allows you to set the following attributes of the SpellingChecker object:
- Allow all parenthesized
- this flag determines whether text between parentheses is ignored in spelling checking. This would allow the transcriber to mark utterances in foreign languages, which cannot be found in the lexicon.
- Separating characters
- determines the set of characters (apart from the space character) that separate words. The standard is ".,;:()". If a string like "error-prone" should be considered two separate words, you will like to change this to ".,;:()-". For the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (CGN), the hyphen is not a separator, since words like "mee-eter" should be checked as a whole. If a string like "Mary's" should be considered two separate words, include the apostrophe.
- Allow all names
- determines whether all words that start with a capital are allowed. For the CGN, this is on, since the lexicon does not contain many names.
- Name prefixes
- a space-separated list that determines what small groups of characters can precede names. For the CGN, this is "'s- d' l'", since names like 's-Gravenhage, d'Ancona, and l'Hôpital should be ignored by the spelling checker.
- Allow all words containing
- a space-separated list of strings that make a word correct even if not in the lexicon. For the CGN, this is "* xxx", since words like keuje*d and verxxxing should be ignored by the spelling checker.
- Allow all words starting with
- a space-separated list of prefixes that make a word correct even if not in the lexicon. For the CGN, this is empty.
- Allow all words ending in
- a space-separated list of suffixes that make a word correct even if not in the lexicon. For the CGN, this is "-", since the first word in verzekerings- en bankwezen should be ignored by the spelling checker.
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