Yazhmozhi V M
2026
TamilMayangoliSpell: An Open-Source Neural Framework for Context-Sensitive Mayangoli Error Correction in Tamil
Yazhmozhi V M | Annalu Waller | Jacky Visser
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Yazhmozhi V M | Annalu Waller | Jacky Visser
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Mayangoli errors are context-sensitive errors in Tamil that arise from confusion among phonetically similar graphemes (e.g., ல/ள/ழ, ர/ற, ந/ன/ண). These errors are challenging for conventional spell checkers because both incorrect and correct forms are valid dictionary words, making dictionary lookup insufficient and requiring contextual modelling. We present TamilMayangoliSpell, a reproducible framework for Mayangoli error correction that combines (i) Tamil-specific preprocessing for sentence segmentation and normalisation, (ii) linguistically grounded error induction for generating training data constrained by dictionary validity, and (iii) fine-tuning of multilingual sequence-to-sequence models. Using 30,000 sentence pairs derived from TamilCorp, a massive multi-genre Tamil corpus and split 80/10/10 into train/validation/test, we fine-tune mBART, mT5, and NLLB under a small hyperparameter grid using greedy decoding with a maximum sequence length of 128. mT5 achieves the best performance (BLEU 99.28; Exact Match Accuracy 93.50%) and remains strong in a cross-genre evaluation on short stories. The preprocessing scripts, generated parallel datasets, and trained models are publicly available in a GitHub repository.