The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Hspell is a free Hebrew spell checker. It is used by most Linux distributions, by free applications such as OpenOffice and Firefox, and even by Google's popular Gmail service. Seven years after Hspell's first release, it is a good occasion to look back and see what made it successful. We will review Hspell's design, how it was works, and how it was developed. We will ask ourselves what allowed Hspell to be developed quickly, what ensured its quality, and what made it easy to adopt by all those systems and applications. Finally, we will look at what Hspell can do beyond just spell-checking, and speculate which new linguistic capabilities will be needed by the applications of the next decade.