COMPUTATIONAL MODEL FOR WOLAYITTA LANGUAGE SPELLING CHECKER

Abstract

Spelling checker systems are built, and researches are conducted worldwide to meet the needs of different languages. In Ethiopia, spelling checker researches were carried out for only Amharic language. These works have paved the way for researches on other languages like Wolayitta. A computational spelling checker is proposed and adopted for the Wolayitta language in this research. Word level spelling checker were built based on an edit distance algorithm and language model based open source tools and platforms. A dictionary database was constructed from 13,313 words from Wolayitta lexicon dictionary and 20,000 words from Wolayitta Bible. The database was then clustered into training and testing. The statistical model accept input from the user then check whether it is available in dictionary or not if it is available it will do nothing if not it gives suggestion. The testing was done in two phases where the first is error detection rate and the second evaluation is error correction. Tests were carried out on the input data from the user, and accuracy of 94.57% was achieved for spelling error detection, while accuracy of around 90.98 % was retrieved for the spelling suggestion model. The results were promising, and further researches can be entertained as per the recommendations made by the researcher