Soothsayer 0.4 released

Soothsayer 0.4 is now available for download.

Soothsayer 0.4 includes the new abbreviation expansion predictive plugin. This plugin allows users to specify a file containing a list of abbreviations/expansions pairs. When an abbreviation is entered, the next generated prediction will contain the associated expansion, which is typically a commonly used word or phrase.

This release also includes bug fixes and documentation improvements.

Soothsayer 0.4 is a developer’s preview release. This is a source release only. No precompiled packages or installers are provided.

Users wishing to try out Soothsayer will need to follow the (easy) steps required to build soothsayer on their machine, as detailed in the README file. Please note that SQLite is required to build soothsayer. CPPUnit is optional, but be aware that no unit tests will be built nor run when running `make check’, unless CPPUnit is installed.

Soothsayer 0.4 has been built and tested on various Linux platforms (including 64 bit architectures) and Windows XP + Cygwin platform. If you encounter any issues while building or running soothsayer, please report it to the author.

There is still a lot of work to be done. Currently, the build process trains Soothsayer predictive plugin with a very limited training corpus (a single novel).
Predictive performance can be greatly increased by using a larger training corpus. Users can easily generate predictive resources using a custom text corpus and the extraction tools provided.
Currently, the main predictive plugin is a smoothed uni-bi-tri-gram predictive plugin. The plugin should be extended to be able to support n-grams of any cardinality. More plugins should also be added to take advantage of the multiple predictive source architecture.
Please refer to our TODO list for more details on what needs to be done.