[Aspell-user] Ranking of the Aspell suggestions

[jcrowell]

I am working on a journal article that compares Aspell and Gspell (Gspell is
a java API for spell checking developed by the national library of medicine
-- http://umlslex.nlm.nih.gov/nlsRepository/gspell/doc/userDoc/gspell.html
)and suggests a method to improve the ranking of the suggested terms in
certain very specific cases (specifically, a search engine for medical
information).

So far I have found that Aspell significantly outperforms Gspell.  The nice
thing about Gspell, though, is that it returns a lot of information with
each word in the suggestion list, such as the minimum edit distance and
score used for ranking.  I have noticed that Aspell does not return
suggestions ranked simply according to the minimum edit distance, and I need
to know exactly what scoring method Aspell uses to sort the suggestion list.

If anyone can tell me how to get this information from Aspell I would be
grateful.  If not, then I guess I am going to have to plunge into the
source, so if anyone can give me information about how to plunge into the
source and modify it to extract the information I need, that would be ok
too.

Thanks,

Jon Crowell
Decision System's Group
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Haravard Medical School