Spelling assistance for compound words

This paper describes a method for providing spelling assistance for Germanic compound words. The technique systematically analyzes an unknown word to determine its components, using a dictionary which associates word components with codes that describe their compounding characteristics. Language-specific morphological transformations are used to take into consideration common intraword elision patterns. Special dictionary entries, heuristic rules, and lexical distance measures are used to provide the best possible replacement compound words. The method is fast and provides spelling assistance and hyphenation support in an interactive environment.