Non-word error detection in current South African spellcheckers

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to investigate the
effectiveness of the current South African spellcheckers built by the authors
of this article. To this end translations of the same text, namely
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, will be spellchecked, and the
performances compared across various sample languages. The spellcheckers
themselves will be engaged in layers, so as to monitor the effect of the number
of items in the spellchecker lexica. This innovative research will be preceded
by a discussion of HLT (Human Language Technologies) in South Africa and the
authors' philosophy in this regard, a brief theoretical conspectus of
spellcheckers, a presentation of the methodology employed to create the
spellcheckers, an in-depth study on how to deal with diacritics in
spellcheckers, and a walkthrough of standard spelling and grammar checking
functions — all with specific reference to the African languages.

Southern African Linguistics and
Applied Language Studies 2003 21(4): 307–326