Summary of the paper
| Title | Spell Checking in Spanish: The Case of Diacritic Accents |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jordi Atserias, Maria Fuentes, Rogelio Nazar and Irene Renau |
| Abstract | This article presents the problem of diacritic restoration (or diacritization) in the context of spell-checking, with the focus on an orthographically rich language such as Spanish. We argue that despite the large volume of work published on the topic of diacritization, currently available spell-checking tools have still not found a proper solution to the problem in those cases where both forms of a word are listed in the checker's dictionary. This is the case, for instance, when a word form exists with and without diacritics, such as continuo ‘continuous' and continuó ‘he/she/it continued', or when different diacritics make other word distinctions, as in continúo ‘I continue'. We propose a very simple solution based on a word bigram model derived from correctly typed Spanish texts and evaluate the ability of this model to restore diacritics in artificial as well as real errors. The case of diacritics is only meant to be an example of the possible applications for this idea, yet we believe that the same method could be applied to other kinds of orthographic or even grammatical errors. Moreover, given that no explicit linguistic knowledge is required, the proposed model can be used with other languages provided that a large normative corpus is available. |
| Topics | Authoring tools, proofing, Grammar and Syntax, Multilinguality |
Full paper  |
Spell Checking in Spanish: The Case of Diacritic Accents |
| Bibtex | @InProceedings{ATSERIAS12.754, author = {Jordi Atserias and Maria Fuentes and Rogelio Nazar and Irene Renau}, title = {Spell Checking in Spanish: The Case of Diacritic Accents}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)}, year = {2012}, month = {may}, date = {23-25}, address = {Istanbul, Turkey}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Mehmet Uğur Doğan and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-7-7}, language = {english} } |