Error Correction for Arabic Dictionary Lookup

We describe a new Arabic spelling correction system which is intended for use with electronic dictionary search by learners of Arabic. Unlike other spelling correction systems, this system does not depend on a corpus of attested student errors but on student- and teacher-generated ratings of confusable pairs of phonemes or letters. Separate error modules for keyboard mistypings, phonetic confusions, and dialectal confusions are combined to create a weighted finite-state transducer that calculates the likelihood that an input string could correspond to each citation form in a dictionary of Iraqi Arabic. Results are ranked by the estimated likelihood that a citation form could be misheard, mistyped, or mistranscribed for the input given by the user. To evaluate the system, we developed a noisy-channel model trained on students'speech errors and use it to perturb citation forms from a dictionary. We compare our system to a baseline based on Levenshtein distance and find that, when e...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LREC
• Authors: C. Anton Rytting, Paul Rodrigues, Tim Buckwalter, David Zajic, Bridget Hirsch, Jeff Carnes, Nathanael Lynn, Sarah Wayland, Chris Taylor, Jason White, Charles Blake III, Evelyn Browne, Corey Miller, Tristan Purvis
• Keywords: Arabic Spelling Correction, Citation Forms, Education, LREC 2010, Spelling Correction