An experimental Tagalog Finite State Automata spellchecker with Levenshtein edit-distance feature

Abstract

In this paper, we present an experimental development of a spell checker for the Tagalog language using a set of word list with 300 random root words and three inflected forms as training data and a two-layered architecture of combined Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) with Levenshtein edit-distance. A DFA is used to process strings to identify if it belongs to a certain language via the binary result of accept or reject. The Levenshtein edit-distance of two strings is the number (k) of deletions, alterations, insertions between two sequences of characters. From the sample trained wordlist, results show that a value of 1 for the edit-distance (k) can be effective in spelling Tagalog sentences. Any value greater than 1 can cause suggestion of words even if the spelling of words is correct due to selective and prominent usage of certain characters in the Tagalog language like a, n, g, t, s, l.