Design and Implementation of Afaan Oromo Spell Checker
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Date
2013-06
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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Abstract
Developing language applications or localization of software ;s a resource intensive task Ihal
requires the active participation of stakeholders with various backgrounds (i.e. from lingllislic
and campl/llI/iollal perspecli\'e~~. With a cons/ani increase in /he amou1Ifs of electronic
information and the diverJ'ily of languages which are used to produce them, these challenges get
compounded. Various researches ;n the fields of computotionollinguis/ics and computer science
have been carried oul while slill many more are on Iheir way 10 alleviate such problems. Spell
checker is one pOlential candidate 10 this. Use 0/ compUlers for document preparation is one of
those many ,asks undertaken by different organizations. Introducing texts /0 word processing
tools may result in spelling errors. Hence, texl processing applica/ion software has !>pell
checkers. Inlegraling spell checker in/o word processors reduces Ihe amount of time alld energy
lpentto find and correct/he misl-peJ/ed lYord. However, these lools are not ami/able for A/aan
Oromo language, Lowland East Cushitic sub-family of the Afro-asialic s/lper·phylum language
family spoken in Ethiopia. In this thesis, we describe the design aml implementation 0/ AfaWl
Oromo spell checker.
Morphology ba~ed (i.e. dictionary look-up with morphological rule!>) computational model was
employed to design and develop Afaan Oromo Spell Checker (AOSq. Algorithms Ihat take Ihe
morphological properties of Afaan Oromo into consideration are developed/rom scratch and
applied, as there are no previous such allemplS. The proposed system was evaluated using Iwo
datasets 0/ different size. The experiment result shows thai the lexicon size and nIles in the
knowledge base play a vital role to recognize the valid input word, flag Ihe invalid word and
generate correct suggestion/or Ihe misspelled word.
In general, the algorilhms and techniques used in this study oblained good performance when
compared to the other resource-rich languages like English The resalt obtained encourages the
IIndertaking of further research in the area, especially wil the aim of developing a full-fledged
Afaan Oromo spell checker.
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Keywords
SpeJ/ checker, Error deleclion, Error correction, Morphology, Natural Language, Natural language processing, Afaan Oromo