Ideas for Google Summer of Code/lint for Apertium

Make a program which tests Apertium data files for suspicious or unrecommended constructs (likely to be bugs). Sometimes when several people are working on the same code, things can get repeated, or beginners can make unrecommended changes. A lint tester would help people write standard code for dictionaries and transfer files.

Coding challenge

• Write a program which parses a .dix file and for each (surface form, lexical form) pair, lists entries/paradigms which generate this pair.

Examples

Redundant entries: It may happen to have two (or more) entries in a monolingual dictionary generating the same lexical forms. It is more usual to find an entry which generates a subset of the lexical forms generated by another entry. For instance, a few weeks ago we found the entries:

<e lm="soleado">solead<par n="absolut/o__adj"/></e>

<e lm="soleado" a="prompsit">solead<par n="abstract/o__adj"/></e>

The first one generates all the forms of the adjective for masculine/feminine and singular/plural. The second one generates the same forms but, in addition, it generates the superlative forms. Obviously, some redundancy exists in this case, so it may be interesting to detect this phenomena to choose the correct entry.