Improving a Spelling Checker for Afrikaans

Abstract

In this paper we describe the development of an improved spelling checker for Afrikaans. We compare two currently available spelling checkers and discuss their shortcomings. The existing applications are restricted in their suggestion capabilities, as well as their precision and recall, mainly because they cannot treat morphologically complex words correctly. Here, we will mainly focus on improvements in precision and recall.The general architecture of the existing spelling checker is discussed and several improvements are implemented. We describe an improved lookup phase and a newly added morphological analysis phase. The morphological analysis poses some problems which are also treated. Finally, some remaining problems are mentioned.