Dynamic N-Gram System Based on an Online Croatian Spellchecking Service

As an infrastructure able to accelerate the development of natural language processing applications, large-scale lexical n-gram databases are at present important data systems. However, deriving such systems for world minority languages as it was done in the Google n-gram project leads to many obstacles. This paper presents an innovative approach to large-scale n-gram system creation applied to the Croatian language. Instead of using the Web as the world’s largest text repository, our process of n-gram collection relies on the Croatian online academic spellchecker Hascheck, a language service publicly available since 1993 and popular worldwide. Our n-gram filtering is based on dictionary criteria, contrary to the publicly available Google n-gram systems in which cutoff criteria were applied. After 12 years of collecting, the size of the Croatian n-gram system reached the size of the largest Google Version 1 n-gram systems. Due to reliance on a service in constant use, the Croatian n-gram system is a dynamic one. System dynamics allowed modeling of n-gram count behavior through Heaps’ law, which led to interesting results. Like many minority languages, the Croatian language suffers from a lack of sophisticated language processing systems in many application areas. The importance of a rich lexical n-gram infrastructure for rapid breakthroughs in new application areas is also exemplified in the paper.