This research has focused on evaluating the existing open-source morphological analyzers for two of the most widely spoken indigenous macrolanguages in South America, namely Quechua and Aymara. Firstly, we have evaluated their performance (precision, recall and F1 score) for the individual languages for which they were developed (Cuzco Quechua and Aymara). Secondly, in order to assess how these tools handle other individual languages of the macrolanguage, we have extracted some sample text from school textbooks and educational resources. This sample text was edited in the different countries where these macrolanguages are spoken (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina for Quechua; and Bolivia, Peru and Chile for Aymara), and it includes their different standardized forms (10 individual languages of Quechua and 3 of Aymara). Processing this text by means of the tools, we have (i) calculated their coverage (number of words recognized and analyzed) and (ii) studied in detail the cases for which each tool was unable to generate any output. Finally, we discuss different ways in which these tools could be optimized, either to improve their performances or, in the specific case of Quechua, to cover more individual languages of this macrolanguage in future works as well.

Zamboanga Chabacano (ZC) is the most vibrant variety of Philippine Creole Spanish, with over 400,000 native speakers in the Philippines (as of 2010). Following its introduction as a subject and a medium of instruction in the public schools of Zamboanga City from Grade 1 to 3 in 2012, an official orthography for this variety - the so-called “Zamboanga Chavacano Orthography” - has been approved in 2014. Its complexity, however, is a barrier to most speakers, since it does not necessarily reflect the particular phonetic evolution in ZC, but favours etymology instead. The distance between the correct spelling and the different spelling variations is often so great that delivering acceptable performance with the current de facto spell checking technologies may be challenging. The goals of this research have been to propose i) a spelling error taxonomy for ZC, formalised as an ontology and ii) an adaptive spell checking approach using Character-Based Statistical Machine Translation to correct spelling errors in ZC. Our results show that this approach is suitable for the goals mentioned and that it could be combined with other current spell checking technologies to achieve even higher performance.