Spelling Correction in Agglutinative Languages

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to spelling correction in agglutinative languages that is based on two-level morphology and a dynamic programming based search algorithm. Spelling correction in agglutinative languages is significantly different than in languages like English. The concept of a word in such languages is much wider that the entries found in a dictionary, owing to {}~productive word formation by derivational and inflectional affixations. After an overview of certain issues and relevant mathematical preliminaries, we formally present the problem and our solution. We then present results from our experiments with spelling correction in Turkish, a Ural--Altaic agglutinative language. Our results indicate that we can find the intended correct word in 95\% of the cases and offer it as the first candidate in 74\% of the cases, when the edit distance is 1.