Towards a Spell Checker for Zamboanga Chavacano Orthography

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2685–2697 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2685 Towards a Spell Checker for Zamboanga Chavacano Orthography Marcelo Yuji Himoro∗, Antonio Pareja-Lora∗,∗∗ * ATLAS (UNED – Universidad Nacional de Educaci´on a Distancia), ** Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) S˜ao Paulo, Brazil / Madrid, Spain mhimoro1@alumno.uned.es, aplora@ucm.es Abstract Zamboanga Chabacano (ZC) is the most vibrant variety of Philippine Creole Spanish, with over 400,000 native speakers in the Philippines (as of 2010). Following its introduction as a subject and a medium of instruction in the public schools of Zamboanga City from Grade 1 to 3 in 2012, an official orthography for this variety - the so-called “Zamboanga Chavacano Orthography” - has been approved in 2014. Its complexity, however, is a barrier to most speakers, since it does not necessarily reflect the particular phonetic evolution in ZC, but favours etymology instead. The distance between the correct spelling and the different spelling variations is often so great that delivering acceptable performance with the current de facto spell checking technologies may be challenging. The goals of this research is to propose i) a spelling error taxonomy for ZC, formalised as an ontology and ii) an adaptive spell checking approach using Character-Based Statistical Machine Translation to correct spelling errors in ZC. Our results show that this approach is suitable for the goals mentioned and that it could be combined with other current spell checking technologies to achieve even higher performance. Keywords: Chavacano, Chabacano, Zamboanga, Natural Language Processing, Under-resourced Languages, spell checker. 1. Introduction According to a recent report from Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF, 2015), the Philippines is home to 135 liv- ing languages, among which Chabacano is the only creole language. In the 2010 Census of Population and Hous- ing (CPH), 405,798 people claimed Zamboanga Chaba- cano (ZC, locally known simply as “Chavacano” or “Zam- boangue˜no”) as their mother tongue, thus making it the most widely spoken variety of Philippine Creole Spanish in the country, and the only one still experiencing natural growth (National Statistics Office (NSO), 2003a, 2014a; Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), 2014). With the implementation of the K-12 curriculum and the Mother-Tongue Based Multilingual Education (MTB- MLE) program nationwide in 2012, ZC is nowadays taught as a subject and is used as a medium of instruction in the public schools of Zamboanga City from Grade 1 to 3 (Gov- ernment of the Philippines, 2011). This has motivated the local government to invest in the standardisation of ZC, resulting in the approval of an official orthography (Zam- boanga Chavacano Orthography) in 2014, followed by the publication of a basic grammar, as well as some collections of texts and children’s books; even a normative dictionary was published in late 2018. Despite all the official initiatives in the last few years, the testimonials of many Zamboangue˜nos suggest that there might be no room for optimism. ZC has been facing a multiglossic situation for decades and there are …

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