Detection and Correction of Phonetic Errors with a New Orthographic Dictionary

DETECTION AND CORRECTION OF PHONETIC ERRORS WITH A NEW ORTHOGRAPHIC DICTIONARY Dr. Sivaji Bandyopadhyay Computer Science and Engineering Department Jadavpur University, Calcutta, INDIA. E-mail : ilidju@cal2.vsnl.net.in ABSTRACT The Phonetic and the Homophone Error problem in a language have been characterized as a symbol substitution problem. Phonetically equivalent symbols or symbol combinations in the language are grouped together. Each group or a number of related groups give(s) rise to a dictionary or a number of dictionaries. A new design methodology for Orthographic Dictionaries in alphabetic languages has been described. The dictionaries include the root words. The meanings are stored only in case of Homophone words. Words are sorted on the basis of a Phonetic Ordering Scheme. The dictionaries are being used to detect and correct the Phonetic Error and the Homophone Error in isolated words of Bengali. The methodologies described in this paper can be used in developing spell-checkers not only for other Indian languages which have evolved from the ancient Brahmi script and have a common phonetic structure but also for other alphabetic languages with suitable modifications. 1. The Phonetic Error Problem in NLP - an Introduction The practical NLP systems must deal with erroneous or ill-formed inputs. The nature of errors basically depends on the source of input as well as on the user's exceeding the systems limited grammatical, conceptual or functional coverage. Automatic word correction research may be viewed [7] as focusing on three increasingly broader problems: (1) nonword error detection; (2) isolated word error correction; and (3)context dependent word correction. Work on the isolated-word error correction spanned from as early as the 1960s into the present. Distinctions are sometimes made among three different types of nonword misspellings : (1) Typographic Errors - the writer or the typist knows the correct spelling but simply makes a motor coordination slip, (2) Cognitive Errors - due to misconception or lack of knowledge on the part of the writer or the typist and (3) Phonetic Errors - a special class of cognitive errors in which the writer substitutes a phonetically correct but orthographically incorrect sequence of letters for the intended words. Moreover, there exists a class of real-word errors in which the misspellings result in a valid word. It occurs due to the presence of words in the language having similar pronunciation but different meaning. This is also termed as Homophone Errors. With an increase in Natural Language applications using Indian Languages, it has become necessary to study the reasons and the nature of errors that can occur in these languages and how these errors can be detected and corrected. In the present work, the Phonetic and the Homophone error problem in Bengali have been studied in detail. 2. The Phonetic and the Homophone Error Problem in Bengali Bengali is an important language in India and has evolved from the ancient Brahmi Script. The people in the neighboring country of Bangladesh use Bengali as their Official Language. The discrepancy between the spelling of a word in Bengali and its pronunciation has …

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