Arabic spellchecking: a depth-filtered composition metric to achieve fully automatic correction

Abstract

Digital environments for human learning have evolved a lot in recent years thanks to incredible advances in information technologies. Computer assistance for text creation and editing tools represent a future market in which natural language processing (NLP) concepts will be used. This is particularly the case of the automatic correction of spelling mistakes used daily by data operators. Unfortunately, these spellcheckers are considered writing aids tools, they are unable to perform this task automatically without user’s assistance. In this paper, we suggest a filtered composition metric based on the weighting of two lexical similarity distances in order to reach the auto-correction. The approach developed in this article requires the use of two phases: the first phase of correction involves combining two well-known distances: the edit distance weighted by relative weights of the proximity of the Arabic keyboard and the calligraphical similarity between Arabic alphabet, and combine this measure with the JaroWinkler distance to better weight, filter solutions having the same metric. The second phase is considered as a booster of the first phase, this use the probabilistic bigram language model after the recognition of the solutions of error, which may have the same lexical similarity measure in the first correction phase. The evaluation of the experimental results obtained from the test performed by our filtered composition measure on a dataset of errors allowed us to achieve a 96% of auto-correction rate.