Spell Checking in Spanish: The Case of Diacritic Accents

Jordi Atserias, Maria Fuentes, Rogelio Nazar, 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.
Anthology ID:
L12-1440
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
737–742
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/754_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jordi Atserias, Maria Fuentes, Rogelio Nazar, and Irene Renau. 2012. Spell Checking in Spanish: The Case of Diacritic Accents. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 737–742, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Spell Checking in Spanish: The Case of Diacritic Accents (Atserias et al., LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/754_Paper.pdf