As part of the HebMorph project, I needed to test hspell's dictionary on a large modern corpus. Knowing how many words it can recognize is very important, and below I'll be explaining exactly why. The project, along with usage instructions, is released under the GNU GPL and available from here. The ...

In the past week I've been working on making Hebrew indexing with HebMorph more flexible. Now it is possible to perform different type of searches, and also control the way lemmas are filtered. You can also perform exact searches and morphological searches on one field, without indexing the contents...

Last week work on the second edition of Lucene In Action has been completed, and the book was sent to print. This book, authored by Michael McCandless, Erik Hatcher and Otis Gospodnetić, is hands down the best guide to Lucene, the high-performance search engine library. Whether you are new to it, or...

Indexing Hebrew texts for later retrieval is not a trivial task. Although several solutions exist, I have pointed out that they are not necessarily providing the best results. Either way, there is no freely available solution allowing to index Hebrew even at the very basic level. HebMorph was starte...

As shown in the previous post, building a Hebrew-aware search engine is not trivial. Several attempts (mainly commercial) were made to deal with that. In this post I'm going to try and draw a complete picture of what they did, and show other routes that may exist. In the next post I'll discuss HebMo...

Unfortunately, there is no magic trick for correctly indexing and searching Hebrew texts. Semitic languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic are the hardest to morphologically analyze and disambiguate, and as a result creating a perfect IR solution for them, if at all possible, requires a lot of res...

Imagine you are working on a .NET WinForms application, and it has many small user tasks which require you to disable all input controls in your form. What happens if each of those also has quite a lot of possible exit points? returning and re-enabling the GUI in all of them is quite a pain. The fol...

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