I have a lot of compound strings that are a combination of two or three English words.
e.g. "Spicejet" is a combination of the words "spice" and "jet"
I need to separate these individual English words from such compound strings. My dictionary is going to consist of around 100000 words.
What would be the most efficient by which I can separate individual English words from such compound strings.
If the aim is to find the "the largest possible break up for the input" as you replied, then the algorithm could be fairly straightforward if you use some graph theory. You take the compound word and make a graph with a vertex before and after every letter. You'll have a vertex for each index in the string and one past the end. Next you find all legal words in your dictionary that are substrings of the compound word. Then, for each legal substring, add an edge with weight 1 to the graph connecting the vertex before the first letter in the substring with the vertex after the last letter in the substring. Finally, use a shortest path algorithm to find the path with fewest edges between the first and the last vertex.
The pseudo code is something like this:
parseWords(compoundWord)
# Make the graph
graph = makeGraph()
N = compoundWord.length
for index = 0 to N
graph.addVertex(i)
# Add the edges for each word
for index = 0 to N - 1
for length = 1 to min(N - index, MAX_WORD_LENGTH)
potentialWord = compoundWord.substr(index, length)
if dictionary.isElement(potentialWord)
graph.addEdge(index, index + length, 1)
# Now find a list of edges which define the shortest path
edges = graph.shortestPath(0, N)
# Change these edges back into words.
result = makeList()
for e in edges
result.add(compoundWord.substr(e.start, e.stop - e.start + 1))
return result
I, obviously, haven't tested this pseudo-code, and there may be some off-by-one indexing errors, and there isn't any bug-checking, but the basic idea is there. I did something similar to this in school and it worked pretty well. The edge creation loops are O(M * N), where N is the length of the compound word, and M is the maximum word length in your dictionary or N (whichever is smaller). The shortest path algorithm's runtime will depend on which algorithm you pick.
Word existence could be done with a trie, or more simply with a set (i.e. a hash table). Given a suitable function, you could do:
# python-ish pseudocode
def splitword(word):
# word is a character array indexed from 0..n-1
for i from 1 to n-1:
head = word[:i] # first i characters
tail = word[i:] # everything else
if is_word(head):
if i == n-1:
return [head] # this was the only valid word; return it as a 1-element list
else:
rest = splitword(tail)
if rest != []: # check whether we successfully split the tail into words
return [head] + rest
return [] # No successful split found, and 'word' is not a word.
Basically, just try the different break points to see if we can make words. The recursion means it will backtrack until a successful split is found.
Of course, this may not find the splits you want. You could modify this to return all possible splits (instead of merely the first found), then do some kind of weighted sum, perhaps, to prefer common words over uncommon words.