Incorporating an error corpus into a spellchecker for Maltese

Abstract

This paper discusses the ongoing development of a new Maltese spell checker, highlighting the methodologies which would best suit such a language. We thus discuss several previous attempts, highlighting what we believe to be their weakest point: a lack of attention to context. Two developments are of particular interest, both of which concern the availability of language resources relevant to spellchecking: (i) the Maltese Language Resource Server (MLRS) which now includes a representative corpus of c. 100M words extracted from diverse documents including the Maltese Legislation, press releases and extracts from Maltese web-pages and (ii) an extensive and detailed corpus of spelling errors that was collected whilst part of the MLRS texts were being prepared. We describe the structure of these resources as well as the experimental approaches focused on context that we are now in a position to adopt. We describe the framework within which a variety of different approaches to spellchecking and evaluation will be carried out, and briefly discuss the first baseline system we have implemented. We conclude the paper with a roadmap for future improvements.