Error Correction for Arabic Dictionary Lookup
C. Anton Rytting, Paul Rodrigues, Tim Buckwalter, David Zajic, Bridget Hirsch, Jeff Carnes, Nathanael Lynn, Sarah Wayland, Chris Taylor, Jason White, Charles Blake III, Evelyn Browne, Corey Miller, Tristan Purvis
Abstract
We describe a new Arabic spelling correction system which is intended for use with electronic dictionary search by learners of Arabic. Unlike other spelling correction systems, this system does not depend on a corpus of attested student errors but on student- and teacher-generated ratings of confusable pairs of phonemes or letters. Separate error modules for keyboard mistypings, phonetic confusions, and dialectal confusions are combined to create a weighted finite-state transducer that calculates the likelihood that an input string could correspond to each citation form in a dictionary of Iraqi Arabic. Results are ranked by the estimated likelihood that a citation form could be misheard, mistyped, or mistranscribed for the input given by the user. To evaluate the system, we developed a noisy-channel model trained on students speech errors and use it to perturb citation forms from a dictionary. We compare our system to a baseline based on Levenshtein distance and find that, when evaluated on single-error queries, our system performs 28% better than the baseline (overall MRR) and is twice as good at returning the correct dictionary form as the top-ranked result. We believe this to be the first spelling correction system designed for a spoken, colloquial dialect of Arabic.- Anthology ID:
- L10-1303
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2010
- Address:
- Valletta, Malta
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/440_Paper.pdf
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- C. Anton Rytting, Paul Rodrigues, Tim Buckwalter, David Zajic, Bridget Hirsch, Jeff Carnes, Nathanael Lynn, Sarah Wayland, Chris Taylor, Jason White, Charles Blake III, Evelyn Browne, Corey Miller, and Tristan Purvis. 2010. Error Correction for Arabic Dictionary Lookup. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Error Correction for Arabic Dictionary Lookup (Rytting et al., LREC 2010)
- PDF:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/440_Paper.pdf