Urdu Spell Checker: A Scarce Resource Language

Abstract

In the digital world of computers, several software applications have been developed to ensure spellings of various words. English language is found to have gone far ahead in the development of spell checking applications whilst other languages specifically naming Urdu, lack behind to cherish such technologies. We develop “Urdu Spell Checker” which detects incorrect spellings of a word and provides a list of options containing correct spellings. The spell checker carries correct spellings of words residing inside a predefined lexicon or corpus. It is to ensure whether entered word is correct or not. In case if the input word matches with the corpus words it is considered correct otherwise it is considered as misspelled word. Multiple techniques are used individually as well as a combination these techniques is used to check which set of methods is best in terms of output. By using multiple techniques for error correction, it is observed that Jaro distance provides best results with combination of soundex, shapex and n-gram that is 80.0% precision, 44.87% recall and 57.37% F-Measure.