Jaagup Kippar


2023

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Spelling Correction for Estonian Learner Language
Kais Allkivi-Metsoja | Jaagup Kippar
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

Second and foreign language (L2) learners often make specific spelling errors compared to native speakers. Language-independent spell-checking algorithms that rely on n-gram models can offer a simple solution for improving learner error detection and correction due to context-sensitivity. As the open-source speller previously available for Estonian is rule-based, our aim was to evaluate the performance of bi- and trigram-based statistical spelling correctors on an error-tagged set of A2–C1-level texts written by L2 learners of Estonian. The newly trained spell-checking models were compared to existing correction tools (open-source and commercial). Then, the best-performing Jamspell corrector was trained on various datasets to analyse their effect on the correction results.