Xuxen

Xuxen is a spelling corrector for Basque integrated in MS-Office, OpenOffice, Firefox, OCR programs and others.


It can be downloaded from the Basque Govern's website (> 25.000 downloads)

Eleka is the company which manages it now.



The fact that Basque is a highly inflected language makes the correction of spelling errors extremely difficult because collecting all possible word-forms in a lexicon is an endless task. The simplicity of English inflections made of reduced interest in the research on morphological analysis by computer. In English, the most common practice is to use a lexicon of all of the inflected forms or a minimum set of morphological rules.



Within this context we have implemented XUXEN, our spelling checker-corrector (Aduriz et al., 1997). It completely covers the standard language defined by the Academy of the Basque Language.



XUXEN manages user-lexicons that can be interactively enriched during correction by means of a specially designed human-machine dialogue. It allows the system to acquire the internal features of each new entry (sublexicon, continuation class, and selection marks).



Due to a late process of standardization of the language, writers don't always know the standard form to be used and commit errors. The treatment of these 'typical errors' .is made in a specific way by means of describing them using the two-level lexicon system. In this sense, XUXEN is intended as a useful tool for standardization purposes of present day written Basque.