Converts greeklish i.e 'ti kanete' to greek 'τι κάνετε' and applies appropriate spell-checking. Experimented with the Levenshtein algorithm.
> Convert greeklish to greek
>> Build a BK-tree out of the greek dictionary
On the first run, it builds a BK-tree out of a 500,000-word Greek dictionary greek.dic and stores it in memory. It will also create a local "bk_tree.yml" file, so on subsequent runs, it can be used directly, resulting in faster loading.
>> One to one mapping latin to greek conversion
This is nothing but a one to one mapping of each latin letter into its greek equivalent, specified by the en.yml file, with only few special cases of diphthongs.
>> Greek approximate spell checking / fuzzy search
For each mapped word to its greek equivalent, it parses the bk-tree and transforms it to the closest word it finds, specified by the DIST_THRESHOLD constant with a default value of 1. Meaning, it will either return exact matches of 0 distance or the first 3 matches with distance 1. example: αυπο -> "αυτό/αυγό". The larger the DIST_THRESHOLD the slower the performance.
Understanding Levenshtein edit distance (article)
Understanding Levenshtein edit distance (video)
irb
require './lib/greeklish'
Greeklish.convert('ti kanete')