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Arabic spelling error detection and correction†

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2015

MOHAMMED ATTIA ,
PAVEL PECINA ,
YOUNES SAMIH ,
KHALED SHAALAN  and
JOSEF VAN GENABITH
MOHAMMED ATTIA
Affiliation:
School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland, e-mail: mattia@computing.dcu.ie, josef@computing.dcu.ie Faculty of Engineering and IT, The British University in Dubai, UAE e-mail: khaled.shaalan@buid.ac.ae
PAVEL PECINA
Affiliation:
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: pecina@ufal.mff.cuni.cz
YOUNES SAMIH
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Information Science, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany e-mail: samih@phil.uni-duesseldorf.de
KHALED SHAALAN
Affiliation:
Faculty of Engineering and IT, The British University in Dubai, UAE e-mail: khaled.shaalan@buid.ac.ae
JOSEF VAN GENABITH
Affiliation:
School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland, e-mail: mattia@computing.dcu.ie, josef@computing.dcu.ie
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Abstract

A spelling error detection and correction application is typically based on three main components: a dictionary (or reference word list), an error model and a language model. While most of the attention in the literature has been directed to the language model, we show how improvements in any of the three components can lead to significant cumulative improvements in the overall performance of the system. We develop our dictionary of 9.2 million fully-inflected Arabic words (types) from a morphological transducer and a large corpus, validated and manually revised. We improve the error model by analyzing error types and creating an edit distance re-ranker. We also improve the language model by analyzing the level of noise in different data sources and selecting an optimal subset to train the system on. Testing and evaluation experiments show that our system significantly outperforms Microsoft Word 2013, OpenOffice Ayaspell 3.4 and Google Docs.

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 22 , Issue 5 , September 2016 , pp. 751 - 773
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

†

We are grateful to our anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have helped us to improve the paper considerably. This research is funded by the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology (IRCSET), the UAE National Research Foundation (NRF) (Grant No. 0514/2011), the Czech Science Foundation (grant no. P103/12/G084), DFG Collaborative Research Centre 991: The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science (http://www.sfb991.uni-duesseldorf.de/sfb991), and the Science Foundation Ireland (Grant No. 07/CE/I1142) as part of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (www.cngl.ie) at Dublin City University.

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